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Special Focus

AWID is an international, feminist, membership organisation committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women’s human rights

Protection of the Family

The Issue

Over the past few years, a troubling new trend at the international human rights level is being observed, where discourses on ‘protecting the family’ are being employed to defend violations committed against family members, to bolster and justify impunity, and to restrict equal rights within and to family life.

The campaign to "Protect the Family" is driven by ultra-conservative efforts to impose "traditional" and patriarchal interpretations of the family, and to move rights out of the hands of family members and into the institution of ‘the family’.

“Protection of the Family” efforts stem from:

  • rising traditionalism,
  • rising cultural, social and religious conservatism and
  • sentiment hostile to women’s human rights, sexual rights, child rights and the rights of persons with non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations.

Since 2014, a group of states have been operating as a bloc in human rights spaces under the name “Group of Friends of the Family”, and resolutions on “Protection of the Family” have been successfully passed every year since 2014.

This agenda has spread beyond the Human Rights Council. We have seen regressive language on “the family” being introduced at the Commission on the Status of Women, and attempts made to introduce it in negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals.


Our Approach

AWID works with partners and allies to jointly resist “Protection of the Family” and other regressive agendas, and to uphold the universality of human rights.

In response to the increased influence of regressive actors in human rights spaces, AWID joined allies to form the Observatory on the Universality of Rights (OURs).  OURs is a collaborative project that monitors, analyzes, and shares information on anti-rights initiatives like  “Protection of the Family”.

Rights at Risk, the first OURs report, charts a map of the actors making up the global anti-rights lobby, identifies their key discourses and strategies, and the effect they are having on our human rights.   

The report outlines “Protection of the Family” as an agenda that has fostered collaboration across a broad range of regressive actors at the UN.  It describes it as: “a strategic framework that houses “multiple patriarchal and anti-rights positions, where the framework, in turn, aims to justify and institutionalize these positions.”

 

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Snippet - WITM Acknowledgements - PT

Agradecimentos

A AWID agradece sinceramente às várias pessoas cujas ideias, análises e contribuições moldaram a pesquisa e a defesa do “Onde está o dinheiro” ao longo dos anos.

Em primeiro lugar, os nossos mais sinceros agradecimentos aos membres da AWID e às ativistas que participaram nas colaborações com o WITM e testaram este questionário connosco, ao partilhar tão generosamente o seu tempo, análise e espírito.

Agradecemos aos movimentos feministas, aos aliados e aos fundos feministas, incluindo, mas não se limitando ao Black Feminist Fund, Pacific Feminist Fund, ASTREA, FRIDA Young Feminist Fund, Purposeful, Kosovo Women's Network, Human Rights Funders Network, CEECCNA Feminist Fund e PROSPERA, pelas suas investigações rigorosas sobre o estado de financiamento, pela análise perspicaz e pela defesa contínua de mais recursos de melhor qualidade e poder para a organização feminista e de justiça de género em todos os contextos.

Junte-se à comunidade global de feministas que se manifestam sobre o estado de financiamento, e exigem mais recursos de melhor qualidade e poder para feministas globalmente.

Efua Dorkenoo

Affectueusement connue sous le nom de « Mama Efua », Efua a lutté contre les mutilations génitales féminines (MGF) pendant trois décennies et a contribué à attirer l'attention et l'action de la communauté internationale pour mettre fin à cette pratique néfaste.

En 1983, Efua a cofondé FORWARD (fondation pour la santé, la recherche et le développement des femmes), qui est devenue une organisation de premier plan dans la lutte contre les MGF. Son livre intitulé « Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation »  (couper la rose), publié en 1994, est considéré comme le premier ouvrage sur les mutilations génitales féminines. Il figure parmi « Les 100 meilleurs livres africains du XXe siècle » de l’Université de Columbia.

Originaire du Ghana et infirmière de formation, Efua a rejoint l'OMS en 1995 et a réussi à faire en sorte que les mutilations génitales féminines fassent partie des agendas politiques des États membres de l'OMS. Elle a également travaillé en étroite collaboration avec le gouvernement nigérian pour élaborer une politique nationale globale qui servirait de base légale aux lois nigérianes contre les mutilations et qui est toujours en vigueur à ce jour.

Son travail de pionnière a abouti à une campagne menée par l'Afrique intitulée « The Girl Generation », qui s'est engagée à mettre fin aux MGF en une génération. Efua a montré comment une seule personne peut devenir la voix unificatrice d'un mouvement : « Une identité partagée peut aider à rassembler des activistes d'horizons différents dans un but commun ». Ces mots, emplis de sagesse, sont plus pertinents que jamais.


 

Efua Dorkenoo, Ghana

Snippet FEA collaborator and allies Photo 4 (EN)

This photo represents Sopo speaking at a public event indoors. She is holding the microphone while reading her notes and sitting on a chair between three other people who are either speakers or moderators.
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Framework & Theme

The theme of the 14th AWID International Forum is: “Feminist Realities: our power in action”. 

In our 14th Forum, we will celebrate and amplify Feminist Realities that are around us, in all stages of development. 

We want to make this Forum our Feminist Reality - a place where you can inhabit a different world, where you bring your victories, the solutions you have devised; what makes you feel stronger, hopeful and ready to go on. It will be different from any other convening you have previously attended. 

We urge you to join us in co-creating this world. It will be worth it!


Each Forum has a theme that reflects the needs of our membership and movements, and responds to our analysis of the current context.

The global context

Currently fascisms, fundamentalisms, authoritarianism and unfettered corporate power are gaining momentum globally. We see these threats converging with the State to shape public norms, narratives, and policies,  entrenching a culture of fear, hate and incitement to violence in public discourse. States, previously the target of advocacy and rights claims, in many cases no longer feel accountable and in some cases themselves don’t have the power to uphold rights.

This time of volatility, complexity and uncertainty requires creativity in how we organize across movements, coherence in what we demand and daring in what we propose. 

From Feminist Futures to Feminist Realities

AWID’s 2016 Forum centered on Feminist Futures and the conditions needed to bring such futures about. It was clear then, and remains evident now, the enormous challenge for many social justice movements to think outside of the current system for structural solutions. Imaginations can become narrowed from long experiences of inequality and oppression. But what we also heard then and we see all around us is that feminist movements are indeed living and promoting rights-and justice-oriented realities and solutions in big and small ways. 

Indeed we see an urgency to mobilize from a place of hope, rather than from a lowest common denominator - hope that is grounded in the certainty that across the globe, however imperfectly, are experiences and practices that embody more just ways of being in the world and that by sharing, strengthening and building on these experiences, we can help them grow their influence.

These are not impossible dreams, but lived realities. This sense of possibility is a spark to re-examine and re-appreciate the transformative dimensions in our work. 


A few examples of Feminist Realities across the globe

At AWID, we understand feminist realities as the living, breathing examples of the worlds we know are possible.  We understand these diverse feminist realities as reclamations and embodiments of hope and power. They are embedded in the multiple ways  that show us that there is a different way of living, thinking and doing-- from the daily expressions of how we live and relate to each other, to alternative systems of governance and justice. Feminist Realities resist dominant power systems such as patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. 

These are powerful propositions that orient us toward a vision of what is possible, and show how feminist organizing is blazing a path toward justice in movements and communities around the world. 

  • In a deeply marginalized Black community in Jackson, Mississippi, an experiment in solidarity and cooperative economics is taking place through Cooperation Jackson. An ambitious plan to build community ownership outside of capitalist modes of production.

  • In West Africa, women farmers are resisting land grabbing and refusing industrialized agriculture projects, boldy claiming We Are The Solution, in a campaign to build agro-ecological solutions that center women farmers and their knowledges as the solutions to feed communities and mitigate climate change

  • Similarly, in India, 5,000 women have come together to develop community-based food sovereignty systems based on local knowledge, including grain and seed banks

  • Women in Mexico have created a moneyless economy project created by and for women and everyone they know. In El Cambalache everything has the same value: people exchange things they no longer need for things they want as well as knowledge, abilities and mutual aid that people would like to share. El Cambalache was built on the anti-systemic, anti-capitalist values of local social movements

  • In Rojava, Kurdish people are building democracy without the state and Kurdish women offer Jineology as a framework for challenging patriarchy, capitalism and the state, creating systems and institutions to put this framework into practice

  • In the UK, Anarcho Agony Aunts are a sex and dating advice show, covered from a feminist, antifascist, anarchist perspective. Hosts Rowan and Marijam are reclaiming space from the alt-right in giving people (mostly men) a space to ask tricky questions in a judgment-free zone. 

  • The African Feminist Judgment Project drafts and disseminates alternative judgments for important African landmark cases on a range of legal issues. At the heart of the project is propositional feminist judicial practice and alternative feminist judgments that contribute to African jurisprudence, legal practice and judicial decision-making 

  • The Usha Cooperative in India was founded when mainstream banks refused services to sex workers in Sonagachi. Sex workers self-organized to prioritize their economic concerns and set up their own financial institution. The Usha Cooperative is cooperative bank of over 20,000 sex workers and has provided over USD 4.7M in loans to 7,231 sex workers in a span of one year. With a membership entirely of sex workers, the bank provides real ownership and influence over the cooperative’s governance and management, pioneering ways for individuals and communities on the margins to build economic power on their own terms. 

  • In Puerto Rico, a community land trust is helping to transform an informal settlement around a polluted and flood prone river channel into a sustainable community. It provides a new model for improving informal settlements in cities without them then becoming unaffordable for the original residents.

  • In several Latin American countries activists are providing peer-to-peer counselling and accompaniment on medical abortion, reclaiming women´s right to decide over their bodies as well as to medical knowledgde. (for safety reasons, no links are provided.


The 14th AWID international Forum

The AWID Forum will be organized around 6 thematic anchors:

  • Resources for Communities, Movements and Economic Justice
  • Governance, accountability and justice
  • Digital Realities 
  • Bodies, pleasure and wellbeing
  • Planet and living beings
  • Feminist organizing 

Learn more about these anchors

Building on those realities, we expect the 2020 Forum to:

  • Build the power of Feminist Realities, by naming, celebrating, amplifying and contributing to build momentum around experiences and propositions that shine light on what is possible and feed our collective imaginations
  • Replenish wells of hope and energy as much needed fuel for rights and justice activism and resilience
  • Strengthen connectivity, reciprocity and solidarity across the diversity of feminist movements and with other rights and justice-oriented movements

The Forum is a collaborative process

The Forum is more than a four-day convening. It is one more stop on a movement strengthening journey around Feminist Realities that has already begun and will continue well beyond the Forum dates.

Join us on this journey!

مجموعتنا، منظمتنا و\أو حركتنا غير مسجلة. هل علينا تعبئة الاستطلاع؟

نعم! نريد أن نسمع منكم/ن عن تجربتكم/ن بالتمويل.

Su’ad Al-Ali

Su’ad was a strong advocate of women’s and children’s rights, and was the head of Al-Weed Al-Alaiami - an Iraqi human rights organisation.

She participated in the July 2018 demonstrations that took place in Basra and several other Iraqi cities protesting unemployment and demanding jobs and proper public services for citizens, as well as calling for the elimination of rampant corruption.

On 25 September 2018, Su’ad was assassinated in the Al-Abbasiyah district in downtown Basra. A video of the incident showed a person approaching her as she was getting into her car, firing a bullet at the back of her head and pointing another bullet at her driver Hussain Hassan, who was injured in the shoulder. Al-Ali was 46 and the mother of four children.


 

Su'ad Al Ali, Iraq

Snippet FEA different lines of work S4 (ES)

Líneas de trabajo:

EN CONTRA DE

El Fondo Acceso para el Foro de AWID

Nos esforzamos para hacer que el Foro de AWID sea un encuentro verdaderamente global, con participación de un conjunto diverso de movimientos, regiones y generaciones. Con este fin, AWID moviliza recursos para un Fondo Acceso (FA) limitado para ayudar a algunxs participantes con los costos de asistir al Foro. 

El 14° Foro Internacional de AWID tendrá lugar entre el 11 y el 14 de enero de 2021 en Taipei, Taiwán. 


¿Cómo será asignado el Fondo Acceso?

Para este Foro de AWID no habrá proceso de postulación​. 

Las becas del Fondo Acceso serán asignadas sólo por invitación para:

  • Dos personas por actividad seleccionada para el programa del Foro (decididas por aquellas organizaciones, grupos o individuos que organizan la actividad)
  • Participantes que se identifiquen como parte de Colectivos Prioritarios del Foro (CPF) recomendadxs por las organizaciones, redes y grupos que están creando el Foro junto con AWID. Los CPF son aquellos que consideramos que fortalecerían nuestro poder colectivo como movimientos, que no estén centrados en los movimientos feministas dominantes, y cuyas realidades feministas nos gustaría honrar, celebrar y visibilizar:
    - Feministas negrxs 
    - Feministas indígenas 
    - Feministas trans, de género no convencional e intersex 
    - Feministas con discapacidades  
    - Feministas trabajadorxs sexuales y trabajadorxs informales, incluyendo trabajadorxs migrantes 
    - Feministas afectadxs por la migración  
    - Mujeres afectadas por la política de drogas 
    - Feministas de las regiones del Foro (con el foco en el Pacífico y en China continental) 

Además, AWID va a financiar a aproximadamente 100 participantes del país anfitrión del Foro. Lxs integrantes de los Comités del Foro (Contenidos y Metodología, Acceso y Anfitrionxs así como el Grupo de Trabajo de Artistas también tendrán apoyo del Fondo Acceso.

¿Qué cubre el Fondo Acceso?

Para lxs participantes seleccionadxs, el Fondo Acceso cubrirá el costo de su:

  • Vuelo 
  • Alojamiento 
  • Visa
  • Transporte local en Taipei
  • Seguro médico de viaje 

El Fondo Acceso no cubrirá su: 

  • Inscripción al Foro, una pequeña suma de $100 dólares
  • Transporte hacia y desde el aeropuerto en su ciudad de partida 
  • Otros costos eventuales

Aparte del Fondo Acceso, ¿cómo puedo financiar mi participación en el Foro?

Hemos preparado una lista con otras ideas sobre cómo puedes financiar tu participación en el Foro de AWID en la página de Ideas sobre financiamiento. 

Más Ideas sobre financiamiento

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Fahmida Riaz

“Afterwards
After love the first time,
Our naked bodies and minds
A hall of mirrors,
Wholly unarmed, utterly fragile,
We lie in one another's arms
Breathing with care,
Afraid to break
These crystal figurines.” - Fahmida Riaz

Fahmida Riaz broke social taboos by writing about female desire in her poetry, creating alternative narratives about women’s bodies and sexuality, and setting new standards in Urdu literature.

Her work faced harsh criticism from conservatives, who accused her of using erotic and “pornographic” expressions in her poetic language. 

Fahimida was eventually blacklisted and charged with sedition under Section 124A of the Pakistan Penal Code) during the dictatorship of Zia Ul Haq. Forced into exile in 1981, she spent almost seven years in India before returning to Pakistan. 

As part of the preface to “Badan Dareeda” ('The Torn-Bodied'), a collection of poetry published in 1974, she wrote: 

If, indeed, I am forced to stand before this maqtal today and face the gallows, I should face them with my head held high. My poems are the trace of a mangled head: emanating sounds even as it is suspended from ropes... A Body Torn has taken the form of a razmia, or the sound of rupture. And if such rupture indeed shocks a people, then consider the poet as having achieved her purpose: she has managed to disturb them. (translation from Urdu by Asad Alvi)

The brilliance of Fahmida was in defying any singular logic or categories of gender, nation, religion or culture. She refused to be put in the role of a ‘woman poet’, breaking with traditional definitions of feminine poetry and concepts and themes (ranging from political consciousness, body, culture, desire, religion, home) and knocking down inhibitions put on her gender. 

“You have to understand that culture can have no essence. Cultures move, flowing into one another, forming new cultures. Culture is born this way. There is no clash of cultures.” 

Fahmida authored more than 15 books on poetry and fiction including her poem ‘Taaziyati Qaraardaaden’ (‘Condolence Resolutions’) that might serve as an appropriate tribute to her life and legacy and a collection of poems (Apna Jurm To Saabit He ‘My Crime Stands Proven’) published in 1988 during her time in exile. 

Fahmida Riaz was born in Meerut, India on 28 July 1946 and passed away on 21 November 2018 in Lahore, Pakistan.

Snippet FEA Decent Pay (FR)

Illustration d'une main à la peau blanche tenant de l'argent rose sur un fond turquoise.

DES SALAIRES DÉCENTS

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Reason to join 1

Faites partie d’une organisation et d’une communauté internationales, associatives et féministes. Nos membres sont établi·e·s dans toutes les régions du monde; iels apprennent les un·e·s des autres et se soutiennent mutuellement dans un réseau mondial fondé sur la solidarité.