Building Feminist Economies is about creating a world with clean air to breath and water to drink, with meaningful labour and care for ourselves and our communities, where we can all enjoy our economic, sexual and political autonomy.
In the world we live in today, the economy continues to rely on women’s unpaid and undervalued care work for the profit of others. The pursuit of “growth” only expands extractivism - a model of development based on massive extraction and exploitation of natural resources that keeps destroying people and planet while concentrating wealth in the hands of global elites. Meanwhile, access to healthcare, education, a decent wage and social security is becoming a privilege to few. This economic model sits upon white supremacy, colonialism and patriarchy.
Adopting solely a “women’s economic empowerment approach” is merely to integrate women deeper into this system. It may be a temporary means of survival. We need to plant the seeds to make another world possible while we tear down the walls of the existing one.
We believe in the ability of feminist movements to work for change with broad alliances across social movements. By amplifying feminist proposals and visions, we aim to build new paradigms of just economies.
Our approach must be interconnected and intersectional, because sexual and bodily autonomy will not be possible until each and every one of us enjoys economic rights and independence. We aim to work with those who resist and counter the global rise of the conservative right and religious fundamentalisms as no just economy is possible until we shake the foundations of the current system.
Advance feminist agendas: We counter corporate power and impunity for human rights abuses by working with allies to ensure that we put forward feminist, women’s rights and gender justice perspectives in policy spaces. For example, learn more about our work on the future international legally binding instrument on “transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights” at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Mobilize solidarity actions: We work to strengthen the links between feminist and tax justice movements, including reclaiming the public resources lost through illicit financial flows (IFFs) to ensure social and gender justice.
Build knowledge: We provide women human rights defenders (WHRDs) with strategic information vital to challenge corporate power and extractivism. We will contribute to build the knowledge about local and global financing and investment mechanisms fuelling extractivism.
Create and amplify alternatives: We engage and mobilize our members and movements in visioning feminist economies and sharing feminist knowledges, practices and agendas for economic justice.
“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”.
Arundhati Roy, War Talk
This year we are honoring 19 Women Human Rights Defenders from the Latin America and the Caribbean region. 16 defenders were murdered, including 6 journalists and 4 LGBTQI rights defenders. Please join us in commemorating the life and work of these women by sharing the memes below with your colleagues, friends and networks and by tweeting using the hashtags #WHRDTribute and #16Days.
Please click on each image below to see a larger version and download as a file
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After assessing your organization’s capacity and research goals, you may choose to conduct a survey as one of the methods of data collection for your research analysis.
In this section:
- Why conduct a survey?
- Identify your survey population 1. Online survey 2. Paper survey
- Create your questions 1. Short and clear questions 2. Simple and universal language 3. "Closed" and "open" questions 4. Logical organization 5. Less than 20 mins 6. Simple and exciting
- Test and translate 1. Your advisors 2. Draft and test 3. Translation
- Target the right population 1. Sample size 2. Degree of participation 3. Database and contact list
A survey is an excellent way to gather information on individual organizations to capture trends at a collective level.
For example, one organization’s budget size does not tell you much about a trend in women’s rights funding, but if you know the budgets of 1,000 women’s rights organizations or even 100, you can start to form a picture of the collective state of women’s rights funding.
As you develop your survey questions, keep in mind the research framing that you developed in the previous section.
Remember: Your framing helps you determine what information you are trying to procure through your survey. The data collected from this survey should allow you to accomplish your goals, answer your key questions, and create your final products.
This is an important step – the clearer you are about which populations you want to survey, the more refined your questions will be.
Depending on your research goals, you may want to create separate surveys for women’s rights organizations, women’s funds and donors. Or you may want to focus your survey on women’s groups and collect interviews for women’s funds and donors, as a survey for each population can be resource-intensive.
The questions you ask women’s groups may be different than ones you would ask women’s funds. If you plan on surveying more than one population, we encourage you to tailor your data collection to each population.
At the same time, some key questions for each population can and should overlap in order to draw comparative analysis from the answers.
If you can reach your survey population online, it is useful and efficient to create an online survey.
We recommend two online tools, both which offer free versions:
Survey Gizmo allows you to convert your data for SPSS, a statistical software useful for advanced data analysis
Your data analyst person(s) will be the best person(s) to determine which tool is best for your survey based on staff capacity and analysis plans.
For accessibility, consider making a PDF form version of your survey that you can attach via email. This ensures organizations that have sporadic internet connections or those that pay for it by the minute can download the survey and complete it without requiring a constant online connection.
You may decide that an online approach is not sufficiently accessible or inclusive enough for your popuation.
In this case, you will need to create a paper survey and methods to reach offline populations (through popular events or through post, with pre-stamped envelopes for returning).
Make it easy for participants to complete your survey.
If the questions are confusing or require complex answers, you risk having participants leave the survey unfinished or providing answers that are unusable for your analysis.
Ensure your questions only ask for one item of information at a time.
For example:
- What is your organization’s budget this year?
Easy to answer: participant can easily locate this information for their organization, and it is only asking for one item of information.- What percentage of your budget have you identified as likely sources for funding for your organization, but are still unconfirmed?
Confusing and difficult to answer: are you asking for a list of unconfirmed funding sources or percentage of funding that is likely but unconfirmed?
This information is difficult to obtain: the respondent will have to calculate percentages, which they may not have on hand. This increases the risk that they will not complete the survey.
Many words and acronyms that are familiar to you may be unknown to survey participants, such as “resource mobilization”, “WHRD”, and “M&E”, so be sure to choose more universal language to express your questions.
If you must use industry lingo – phrases and words common to your colleagues but not widely known – then providing a definition will make your survey questions easier to understand.
Be sure to spell out any acronyms you use. For example, if you use WHRD, spell it out as “Women’s Human Rights Defenders".
Closed questions:
Only one response is possible (such as “yes,” “no” or a number). Survey participants cannot answer in their own words and they typically have to choose from predetermined categories that you created or enter in a specific number. Responses to closed questions are easier to measure collectively and are often quantitative.
Example of a closed question: What is your organization’s budget?
Open-ended questions:
These are qualitative questions that are often descriptive. Respondents answer these questions entirely in their own words. These are more suitable for interviews than surveys.
They are harder to analyze at a collective level as compared to closed-end questions, especially if your survey sample is large. However, by making open-ended questions very specific, you will make it easier to analyze the responses.
Whenever possible, design your survey questions so that participants must select from a list of options instead of offering open-ended questions. This will save a lot of data cleaning and analysis time.
Example of open-ended question: What specific challenges did you face in fundraising this year?
Familiarize yourself with different types of questions
There are several ways to ask closed-ended questions. Here are some examples you can review and determine what fits best for the type of data you want to collect:
If you plan to conduct this research at regular intervals (such as every two years), we recommend developing a baseline survey that you can repeat in order to track trends over time.
Set 1: Screening questions
Screening questions will determine the participant’s eligibility for the survey.
The online survey options we provided allow you to end the survey if respondents do not meet your eligibility criteria. Instead of completing the survey, they will be directed to a page that thanks them for their interest but explains that this survey is intended for a different type of respondent.
For example, you only want women’s rights groups in a given location to take this survey. The screening questions can determine the location of the participant and prevent respondents from other locations from continuing the survey.
Set 2: Standardized, basic demographic questions
These questions would collect data specific to the respondent, such as name and location of organization. These may overlap with your screening questions.
If resources permit, you can store these answers on a database and only ask these questions the first year an organization participates in your survey.
This way when the survey is repeated in future years, it is faster for organizations to complete the entire survey, increasing chances of completion.
Set 3: Standardized and mandatory funding questions
These questions will allow you to track income and funding sustainability. Conducted every year or every other year, this allows you to capture trends across time.
Set 4: Special issues questions
These questions account for current context. They can refer to a changing political or economic climate. They can be non-mandatory funding questions, such as attitudes towards fundraising.
For example, AWID’s 2011 WITM Global Survey asked questions on the new “women & girls” investment trend from the private sector.
The shorter, the better: your survey shouldn’t exceed 20 minutes to ensure completion and respect respondents’ time.
It is natural to get excited and carried away by all the types of questions that could be asked and all the information that could be obtained. However, long surveys will lead to fatigue and abandonment from participants or loss of connection between participants and your organization.
Every additional question in your survey will add to your analytical burden once the survey is complete.
General tips
- Ask for exact budgets instead of offering a range (in our experience, specific amounts are more useful in analysis).
- Specify currency! If necessary, ask everyone to convert their answers to the same currency or ask survey takers to clearly state the currency they are using in their financial answers.
- Ensure you collect enough demographic information on each organization to contextualize results and draw out nuanced trends.
For example, if you are analyzing WITM for a particular country, it will be useful to know what region each organization is from or at what level (rural, urban, national, local) they work in order to capture important trends such as the availability of greater funding for urban groups or specific issues.
Involving your partners from the start will allow you to build deeper relationships and ensure more inclusive, higher quality research.
They will provide feedback on your draft survey, pilot test the survey, and review your draft research analysis drawn from your survey results and other data collection.
These advisors will also publicize the survey to their audiences once it is ready for release. If you plan on having the survey in multiple languages, ensure you have partners who use those languages.
If you decide to do both survey and interviews for your data collection, your advisor-partners on your survey design can also double as interviewees for your interview data collection process.
After your survey draft is complete, test it with your partners before opening it up to your respondents. This will allow you to catch and adjust any technical glitches or confusing questions in the survey.
It will also give you a realistic idea of the time it takes to take the survey.
Once the survey is finalized and tested in your native language, it can be translated.
Be sure to test the translated versions of your survey as well. At least some of your pilot testers should be native speakers of the translated languages to ensure clarity.
Your survey sample size is the number of participants that complete your survey.
Your survey sample should reflect the qualities of the larger population you intend to analyze.
For example: you would like to analyze the millions of women’s rights groups in Valyria but you lack the time and resources to survey every single one.
Instead, you can survey only 500 of the Valyrian women’s rights groups – a sample size - to represent the qualities of all the women’s groups in the region.
Recommended sample size
Although it is not necessary to determine your exact sample size before you launch your survey, having a size in mind will allow you to determine when you have reached enough participants or whether you should extend the dates that the survey is available, in case you feel that you have not reached enough people.
Even more important than size of a sample is the degree to which all members of the target population are able to participate in a survey.
If large or important segments of the population are systematically excluded (whether due to language, accessibility, timing, database problems, internet access or another factor) it becomes impossible to accurately assess the statistical reliability of the survey data.
In our example: you need to ensure all women’s groups in Valyria had the opportunity to participate in the survey.
If a segment of women’s groups in Valyria do not use internet, and you only pull participants for your sample through online methods, then you are missing an important segment when you have your final sample, thus it is not representative of all women’s groups in Valyria.
You cannot accurately draw conclusions on your data if segments of the population are missing in your sample size; and ensuring a representative sample allows you to avoid this mistake.
To gain an idea of what the makeup of women’s groups for your area of research (region, population, issue, etc) looks like, it may be useful to look at databases.
By understanding the overall makeup of women’s groups that you plan to target, you can have an idea of what you want your sample to look like - it should be like a mini-version of the larger population.
After participants have taken your survey, you can then gauge if the resulting population you reached (your sample size) matches the makeup of the larger population. If it doesn’t match, you may then decide to do outreach to segments you believe are missing or extend the window period that your survey is open.
Do not be paralyzed if you are unsure of how representative your sample size is – do your best to spread your survey as far and wide as possible.
4. Collect and analyze your data
The current global economic crisis provides stark evidence that the economic policies of the last 3 decades have not been working.
The devastation that the crisis has wrought on the most vulnerable households in the Global North and Global South is a reminder that the formulation of economic policy and the realization of human rights (economic, social, political, civil and cultural) have for too long been divorced from one another. Economic policy and human rights do not have to be opposing forces, but can exist symbiotically.
Macroeconomic policies affect the operation of the economy as a whole, shaping the availability and distribution of resources. Within this context, fiscal and monetary policies are key.
These policies affect key prices such as interest and exchange rates that directly influence, among other things, the level of employment, access to affordable credit, and the housing market.
Applying a human rights framework to macroeconomic policy allows States to better comply with their obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill economic and social rights. Human rights are internationally agreed-upon universal standards. These legal norms are articulated in United Nations treaties including, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
Article 1 of the UDHR states that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
Although the UDHR was written about six decades ago its relevance is enduring. Many of the ideas address concerns and critical issues that people continue to face globally. Issues regarding inhuman punishment (Art. 5), discrimination (Art. 7), property ownership (Art. 17), equal pay for equal work (Art. 23/2), and access to education (Art. 26/1) are pertinent matters in countries South and North of the equator.
More specifically, States have an obligation under international law to respect, protect and fulfill human rights, including the economic and social rights of people within their jurisdiction. This is particularly relevant now given the financial crisis. In the U.S., regulation is skewed in favor of certain interests. The failure to extend government’s supervisory role in the context of social and economic change is a failure with regard to the obligation to protect human rights.
States should abide by key human rights principles to achieve economic and social rights. Some of the principles have potentially important implications for governance of financial institutions and markets, yet these possibilities have been underexplored.
Economic and social rights have a concrete institutional and legal grounding. Global declarations, international treaties, covenants, and, in a number of cases, national constitutions have incorporated aspects of the economic and social rights framework—providing an institutional infrastructure in national and international law.
Some have suggested that a consideration of global justice may not be a useful pursuit because of the institutional complexities involved. However, this does not get around that fact that global institutions already have an impact on social justice, both positive and negative.
It is useful to tease out the implications that elements of alternative frameworks have for economic governance, specifically those supported by existing institutions. Economic and social rights represent one such concrete framework. The framework is an evolving one, and ongoing discussion and deliberation is necessary to address underdeveloped areas and potential deficiencies.
This section is based on CWGL’s blog “Applying a Human Rights Framework to Macroeconomic Policies” (2012).
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Meet Sopo Japaridze, fierce feminist, union leader and chair of the independent service trade union at the Solidarity Network.
She left the country when she was very young to go to the United States where she first became very politically active as a labor organizer. She kept Georgia in the back of her mind all that time, until one day, two decades later, she decided to return.
The existing Georgian union confederation back then was less than ideal. So, equipped with her skills, knowledge and labor organizing experience, Sopo went back to Georgia and built her own union.
Sopo is a passionate researcher and writer. She studies labor and social relations, writes for various publications and is the contributing editor of LeftEast, an Eastern European analytical platform. She also co-founded the political history initiative and podcast, Reimagining Soviet Georgia, where she explores the complexities and nuances of the country's experiences under the Soviet Union, to better understand its past in order to shed light on how to build a better future.
This economical model exploits nature and as it intensifies, so does the inequality between global North with their large corporations, and the global South, where resources are extracted.
Find more on our report on EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES
There are sustainable alternatives for the environment and women's rights.
We all can dance
by Mechthild Möhring (aka serialmel)
How I punt myself at the narrow hard knitting I once retrieved. I'm dancing in the kitchen when I'm alone. Gracile and powerful. When I'm in company I'm clumsy. My body scandalizes, scandalizes the laws of look I feel, scandalizes the words which banished me. "Of course she can dance, it's in her blood as a Black person." "If she is able to dance nicely she is good in bed" they whisper, they murmur, no - they say it openly into my face. They smirk and rub themselves against me and let me move back. I stumble and fall. My feet reject their duty. Bearish I get out of breath. Smiling I place myself out of events and notice how my face freezes into a mask.
Translated into English by Tsepo Bollwinkel
Original in German
Tanzen können wir alle
Von Mechthild Möhring (aka serialmel)
Wie ich mich stosse an den engen, harten Maschen, in die ich mich einst zurückgezogen habe. Ich tanze in der Küche, wenn ich allein bin. Grazil und kraftvoll. Wenn ich in Gesellschaft bin, bin ich unbeholfen. Mein Körper eckt an, an die Gesetze des Blicks, den ich spüre, an die Worte, die mich bannten. „Natürlich kann sie tanzen, als Schwarze hat sie das im Blut.“ „Wenn sie gut tanzen kann, dann ist sie auch gut im Bett“ flüstern sie, raunen sie, nein, sie sagen es mir laut ins Gesicht. Sie grinsen und reiben sich an mir und lassen mich zurückweichen. Ich stolpere und falle. Meine Füsse verweigern ihren Dienst. Tollpatschig gerate ich ausser Atem. Lächelnd setze ich mich an den Rand des Geschehens und bemerke, wie mein Gesicht zur Maske erstarrt.
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Laura was a leading activist and lawyer who campaigned fearlessly for the decriminalisation of sex work in Ireland.
She is remembered as “a freedom fighter for sex workers, a feminist, a mother to a daughter and a needed friend to many.”
Laura advocated for individuals in the sex industry to be recognised as workers deserving of rights. She advanced demands for decriminalisation, including initiating a judicial review at Belfast’s high court in respect of the provisions criminalising the purchase of sex. Laura stated that her intention was to bring the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Welcome to Crear | Résister | Transform: a festival for feminist movements!
AWID is committed to creating an online space that invites and challenges us all to operate from a place of courage, curiosity, generosity and shared responsibility.
We invite you to co-create spaces with us that are free of harassment and violence, where everyone is respected in their gender identity and expression, race, ability, class, religion, language, ethnicity, age, occupation, type of education, sexuality, body size, and physical appearance. Spaces where we recognize inequalities in our world and strive to transform them in our own interactions with each other.
This means that we are able to listen, understand and relate to each other. To feel close, in spite of it all being virtual. For this, we will make interpretation available and open channels (like chat and other tools) for you to react and share. To hear each other better, we invite you to wear headphones during the conversation. If it is possible for you , we suggest that you close your email and any other likely source of distraction while you are in the conversation.
Let us celebrate the multiple ways in which knowledge shows up in our lives. We invite you to approach the conversation with curiosity and openness to learn from others, allowing ourselves to unlearn and relearn through the exchange, as a way to start collectively building knowledge.
We are committed to holistically approaching accessibility by being mindful of different physical, language, mental and safety needs. We want a space that is welcoming of folks from various backgrounds, beliefs, abilities and experiences. We will be proactive but we also ask that you communicate your needs with us, and we will do our best within our capacity to address these needs.
We all commit individually and collectively to respect each other’s privacy and to seek people’s consent before sharing any images or content generated during the conversation that involves them.
Creating a safer, respectful and enjoyable environment for the conversations, is everybody's responsibility.
If you notice that someone is behaving in a discriminatory or offensive manner, please contact the reference person who will be indicated at the beginning of the session.
Any participants that express oppressive language or images, will be removed from the call and will not be readmitted. We will not engage with them in any way.
Ottilie was a Namibian feminist activist, educator and politician.
Ottilie was one of the founders of the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO), the Yu Chi Chan Club (an armed revolutionary group); and the South West African National Liberation Front (SWANLIF). She was also a founder of the Namibian Women’s Association and Girl Child Project.
Throughout her life, Ottilie argued for the right to argue, think, contest, and demand. She mobilized women, organized students and teachers and criticized other comrades for their elitism and their corruption.
Ottilie worked ferociously to dismantle patriarchy, and to create a concrete transformative, liberatory, feminist participatory democracy.
Ottilie often said: “I will rest the day I die.”
Feminist movements have changed and adapted tremendously since we last convened in this way - so to remember why AWID Forums matter, we asked activists from around the world to reflect on and share their stories, impressions and memories. This is what we learned.