Memory as Resistance: A Tribute to WHRDs no longer with us
AWID’s Tribute is an art exhibition honouring feminists, women’s rights and social justice activists from around the world who are no longer with us.
In 2020, we are taking a turn
This year’s tribute tells stories and shares narratives about those who co-created feminist realities, have offered visions of alternatives to systems and actors that oppress us, and have proposed new ways of organising, mobilising, fighting, working, living, and learning.
49 new portraits of feminists and Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) are added to the gallery. While many of those we honour have passed away due to old age or illness, too many have been killed as a result of their work and who they are.
This increasing violence (by states, corporations, organized crime, unknown gunmen...) is not only aimed at individual activists but at our joint work and feminist realities.
The stories of activists we honour keep their legacy alive and carry their inspiration forward into our movements’ future work.
The portraits of the 2020 edition are designed by award winning illustrator and animator, Louisa Bertman.
AWID would like to thank the families and organizations who shared their personal stories and contributed to this memorial. We join them in continuing the remarkable work of these activists and WHRDs and forging efforts to ensure justice is achieved in cases that remain in impunity.
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” - Mexican Proverb
The Tribute was first launched in 2012
It took shape with a physical exhibit of portraits and biographies of feminists and activists who passed away at AWID’s 12th International Forum, in Turkey. It now lives as an online gallery, updated every year.
To date, 467 feminists and WHRDs are featured.
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Sobre el amor por un movimiento

¿Cómo comienza un movimiento?
los fantasmas nos expulsan de una casa, una familia, y una nación
llegamos fatigadas a un espacio (a veces un domicilio real) pero fundamentalmente a un estado de ser
precedidas por una estrella fugaz
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quizás está acompañada por el miedo
quizás nuestra llegada no está acompañada por el miedo
quizás está acompañada por la rabia
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Nos convertimos en semillas,
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las detalladas instrucciones de las brujas
nuestro movimiento es para todas nosotras,
cuando llegamos como semillas con el propósito de florecer.
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We Are the Ones We Have been Waiting For!
We’re beginning a new year--2023. COVID-19 continues to infect and re-infect many, many people around the world. We are witnessing the resurgence of right-wing and fascist governments, even in places we may not have expected like Sweden. War, armed conflict, and dramatic increase in militarization, militarism, and military spending are enabling the unbridled capital accumulation by the few, with participation of seemingly “strange” alliances locking arms, both visibly and invisibly, where economic and political elites of the Global North and Global South are benefitting beyond our wildest imagination. In the meanwhile, our people and the natural environment pay enormous costs and suffer all the expected and unexpected consequences.
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AWID IN 2015: Building Collective Impact

In 2015 AWID grew and diversified.
We ramped up preparations for the 13th AWID international Forum, focused a lot of energy on the Post 2015 Development Agenda and Financing for Development processes, and continued the core work of our priority areas:
- Challenging Religious Fundamentalisms
- Women Human Rights Defenders
- Economic Justice
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- Young Feminist Activism
A sneak peak inside the report
The context
- We continue witnessing the rapid breakdown in democracy and democratic institutions, with spaces for dissent shrinking.
- Multiple and concurrent systemic crises (energy, food, finance and climate) continue to deepen inequalities and pose major challenges.
- Corporations are a leading power in determining the development agenda.
- Violence against WHRDs remains an urgent problem.
- Religious fundamentalisms are pervasive and increasingly powerful.
- New forms of online gender-based violence have emerged.
In response, we are moving out of our silos.
Increasingly, women’s rights and other movements worldwide are articulating the systemic and intersectional nature of these and other problems. We are making better connections with the agendas of other social and environmental movements for solidarity, alliance building and collective responses. We are also seeing greater visibility of these movements fighting for justice on the ground.
Our Impact
- For effective strategizing and advocacy, we need facts
- To exchange knowledge and join hands in solidarity, we need a strong online community
- To build our collective power, we need to work together
- To influence international processes, we need to increase our access and voice
- To reposition power we need to give visibility and emphasize the important role that feminist and women’s rights movements are already playing
Our Members
As at 31st December, 2015 we had:

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