Movement Building
Related Content
What will be different about this Forum?
We have always worked towards ensuring that our Forums are co-developed with partners, movements and our priority constituencies.
For our upcoming Forum, we aim to deepen and strengthen that spirit and practice of co-creation and collaboration. We also recognize the need to improve the balance between the inclusion of many voices and experiences with room for participants and staff to breathe, take pause and enjoy some downtime.
This Forum will be different in the following ways:
- We will have far less organized Forum activities because we want people to have time to engage, experience, process, talk to each other, etc. This is key to communicate: you can come to the Forum, be very engaged and active and not facilitate any organized activity (or “session”).
- We will have Open Spaces - at least one whole afternoon without any organized activities - but also physical spaces available throughout the Forum for people to self-organize meetings, etc.
- We have a Content and Methodology Committee made up of feminists from different regions with expertise on participatory methodologies to support us and all those leading activities at the Forum to use creative and engaging formats for the Forum activities.
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#FreezeFascisms
In the 30 years since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration & Platform for Action, a rising tide of fascisms is exerting significant power and influence within multilateral spaces, backpedalling gender justice gains and human rights protections globally.
Around CSW69, we're co-organizing horizontal, brave spaces on-ground and online, to share strategies and build feminist power beyond Beijing+30. Our collective presence disrupts institutional practices of exclusion in such spaces while supporting movements to organize around feminist alternatives to systems of oppression.
Join the conversations from March 10-21, 2025, as we collectively transform CSW69 into spaces for and about resistance and solidarity.
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AWID at CSW69 Beijing+30 | #FreezeFascisms
Our collective presence disrupts institutional practices of exclusion in such spaces while supporting movements to organize around feminist alternatives to systems of oppression.
Join the conversations from March 10-21, 2025, as we collectively transform CSW69 into spaces for and about resistance and solidarity.
Snippet - Impactmapper’s Database blurb - En

2025 Funding Database by ImpactMapper
Explore 150+ regularly updated funding opportunities in this searchable database, created in response to cuts in development aid. Filter by issue, region, funder type, and eligibility.
Snippet2 - WCFM With smart filtering - EN
With smart filtering for Who Can Fund Me? Database, you can search for funders based on:
WITM - Refreshed DATA SNAPSHOTS - EN
Data Snapshots
Our collective power, wisdom, and commitment have no boundaries, but our bank accounts do.
Data snapshots are based on the responses of 1,174 feminist, women’s rights, LGBTQI+, and allied organizations (hereafter referred to as “feminist and women's rights organizations”) from 128 countries to the Where is the Money for Feminist Organizing? survey. These snapshots reflect experiences from 2021–2023, analyzed in the context of defunding trends unfolding in 2024–2025.
Here’s what you need to know about the current state of resourcing for feminist organizing.
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Feminist Demands for COP30
Les femmes autochtones défenseuses de droits
Ces défenseuses ont fait campagne pour les droits fonciers et ont lutté pour les droits des femmes et des peuples autochtones. Elles se sont opposées aux industries extractives, ont écrit de la poésie et se sont battues pour que l'amour prévale. L'une d'entre elles nous a quitté il y a dix-neuf ans. Nous vous invitons à vous joindre à nous pour rendre hommage à ces défenseuses, à leur travail et à l’héritage qu’elles nous ont laissé. Faites circuler ces mèmes auprès de vos collègues et amis ainsi que dans vos réseaux et twittez en utilisant les hashtags #WHRDTribute et #16Jours.
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Research methology
Over eight years, we did four global surveys and built a research methodology.
In 2013, we published three global reports. These reports confirm that women’s rights organizations are doing the heavy lifting to advance women’s rights and gender equality by using diverse, creative and long-term strategies, all while being underfunded.
Our 2010 global survey showed that the collective income of 740 women’s organizations around the world totaled only USD 104 million. Compare this with Greenpeace International, one organization with a 2010 budget of USD 310 million1. Imagine the impact these groups could have if they were able to access all the financial resources they need and more?
AWID’s WITM research has catalyzed increased funding for women’s rights organizing. WITM research was a driving force behind the Catapult crowdfunding platform, which has raised USD 6.5 million for women’s rights. The Dutch Government cited WITM research as a reason for its unprecedented MDG 3 Fund of EU 82 million. WITM research has also led to the creation of several new funds: FRIDA – The Young Feminist Fund, the Indigenous Women’s Fund, Fundo Elas, the Mediterranean Women’s Fund and the Rita Fund.
Funding trends analyses
While the WITM research has shed important light on the global funding landscape, AWID and partners have identified the need to dig deeper, to analyze funding trends by region, population and issue. In response, organizations are now using AWID’s WITM research methodology to do their own funding trends analyses. For example, in November 2013, Kosova Women’s Network and Alter Habitus – Institute for Studies in Society and Culture published Where is the Money for Women’s Rights? A Kosovo Case Study.
At the same time, AWID continues to collaborate with partners in Where is the Money for Indigenous Women’s Rights (with International Indigenous Women’s Forum and International Funders for Indigenous Peoples) and our upcoming Where is the Money for Women’s Rights in Brazil? (with Fundo Elas).
Several organizations have also conducted their own independent funding trends research, deepening their understanding of the funding landscape and politics behind it. For example, the South Asian Women’s Fund was inspired by AWID’s WITM research to conduct funding trends reports for each country in South Asia, as well as a regional overview. Other examples of research outside of AWID include the collaboration between Open Society Foundations, Mama Cash, and the Red Umbrella Fund to produce the report Funding for Sex Workers Rights, and the first-ever survey on trans* and intersex funding by Global Action for Trans* Equality and American Jewish World Service.
Reclaiming the Commons
Definition
There are varied conceptualizations about the commons notes activist and scholar Soma Kishore Parthasarathy.
Conventionally, they are understood as natural resources intended for use by those who depend on their use. However, the concept of the commons has expanded to include the resources of knowledge, heritage, culture, virtual spaces, and even climate. It pre-dates the individual property regime and provided the basis for organization of society. Definitions given by government entities limit its scope to land and material resources.
The concept of the commons rests on the cultural practice of sharing livelihood spaces and resources as nature’s gift, for the common good, and for the sustainability of the common.
Context
Under increasing threat, nations and market forces continue to colonize, exploit and occupy humanity’s commons.
In some favourable contexts, the ‘commons’ have the potential to enable women, especially economically oppressed women, to have autonomy in how they are able to negotiate their multiple needs and aspirations.
Feminist perspective
Patriarchy is reinforced when women and other oppressed genders are denied access and control of the commons.
Therefore, a feminist economy seeks to restore the legitimate rights of communities to these common resources. This autonomy is enabling them to sustain themselves; while evolving more egalitarian systems of governance and use of such resources. A feminist economy acknowledges women’s roles and provides equal opportunities for decision-making, i.e. women as equal claimants to these resources.

Learn more about this proposition
- Reclaiming the Commons for Gender and Economic Justice: Struggles and Movements in India is an interview to scholar Soma Kishore Parthasarathy on how women in rural India are contesting this reality by proposing a shared management of common resources.
- Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons by Silvia Federici looks at the politics of the commons from a feminist standpoint shaped by the struggle against sexual discrimination and reproductive work, to clarify the conditions under which the principle of the common/s can become the foundation of an anti-capitalist program.
Part of our series of
Feminist Propositions for a Just Economy
Petite Jasmine
When development initiatives, religious fundamentalisms and the state of women’s rights collide
Our new research paper The Devil is in the Details addresses knowledge gaps around religious fundamentalisms within the development sector, and aims to improve understanding of how they constrain development and women’s rights in particular. It provides recommendations for ways development actors can avoid inadvertently strengthening and instead challenge fundamentalisms. [CTA download link: Read the full paper]
Seven pointers to consider
| Graphic1 | 1. Control of women’s bodies, sexuality, and choice are “warning signs” of rising fundamentalisms. |
| 2. Neoliberal economic policies have a particularly negative impact on women, and fuel the growth of religious fundamentalisms. | Graphic2 |
| Graphic3 | 3. Choosing religious organizations as default for partnerships builds their legitimacy and access to resources, and supports their ideology, including gender ideology. |
| 4.Everyone has multiple identities and should be defined by more than just their religion. Foregrounding religious identities tends to reinforce the power of religious fundamentalists. | Graphic4 |
| Graphic5 | 5. Religion, culture, and tradition are constantly changing, being reinterpreted and challenged. What is dominant is always a question of power. |
| 6. Racism, exclusion, and marginalization all add to the appeal of fundamentalists’ offer of a sense of belonging and a “cause”. | Graphic6 |
| Graphic7 | 7. There is strong evidence that the single most important factor in promoting women’s rights and gender equality is an autonomous women’s movement. |
There has been a growth in the power and influence of religious fundamentalist actors globally.
The Devil is in the Details details the grave human rights violations, and violations of women’s rights in particular, caused by state-sponsored fundamentalism, as well as by fundamentalist non-state actors such as militias, religious community organizations, and individuals. Fundamentalist reinforcement of regressive, patriarchal social norms are leading to the rise of violence against women, girls, and women human rights defenders (WHRDs). The paper highlights these key insights for addressing the problem:
- [icon] Religious fundamentalisms are gaining ground within communities
- [icon] Political systems
- [icon] International arenas with devastating effects for ordinary people, women in particular.
There is an urgent need to act for development actors.
Development actors are in a position to take a strong role in this. The collective capacity of development actors to recognize and collaboratively address religious fundamentalisms is vital for advancing social, economic, and gender justice and the human rights of all people in sustainable development. It is vital to promote intersectional feminist understandings of power and privilege, and to apply these to questions of religion and culture. Women’s organizations already have knowledge and strategies to counter fundamentalisms development actors should build on this, and invest in cross-issue coalitions to help them reach new heights.