Martha Araceli Chagoy Valdes
Women Human Rights Defenders
WHRDs are self-identified women and lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBTQI) people and others who defend rights and are subject to gender-specific risks and threats due to their human rights work and/or as a direct consequence of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
WHRDs are subject to systematic violence and discrimination due to their identities and unyielding struggles for rights, equality and justice.
The WHRD Program collaborates with international and regional partners as well as the AWID membership to raise awareness about these risks and threats, advocate for feminist and holistic measures of protection and safety, and actively promote a culture of self-care and collective well being in our movements.
Risks and threats targeting WHRDs
WHRDs are exposed to the same types of risks that all other defenders who defend human rights, communities, and the environment face. However, they are also exposed to gender-based violence and gender-specific risks because they challenge existing gender norms within their communities and societies.
By defending rights, WHRDs are at risk of:
- Physical assault and death
- Intimidation and harassment, including in online spaces
- Judicial harassment and criminalization
- Burnout
A collaborative, holistic approach to safety
We work collaboratively with international and regional networks and our membership
- to raise awareness about human rights abuses and violations against WHRDs and the systemic violence and discrimination they experience
- to strengthen protection mechanisms and ensure more effective and timely responses to WHRDs at risk
We work to promote a holistic approach to protection which includes:
- emphasizing the importance of self-care and collective well being, and recognizing that what care and wellbeing mean may differ across cultures
- documenting the violations targeting WHRDs using a feminist intersectional perspective;
- promoting the social recognition and celebration of the work and resilience of WHRDs ; and
- building civic spaces that are conducive to dismantling structural inequalities without restrictions or obstacles
Our Actions
We aim to contribute to a safer world for WHRDs, their families and communities. We believe that action for rights and justice should not put WHRDs at risk; it should be appreciated and celebrated.
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Promoting collaboration and coordination among human rights and women’s rights organizations at the international level to strengthen responses concerning safety and wellbeing of WHRDs.
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Supporting regional networks of WHRDs and their organizations, such as the Mesoamerican Initiative for WHRDs and the WHRD Middle East and North Africa Coalition, in promoting and strengthening collective action for protection - emphasizing the establishment of solidarity and protection networks, the promotion of self-care, and advocacy and mobilization for the safety of WHRDs;
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Increasing the visibility and recognition of WHRDs and their struggles, as well as the risks that they encounter by documenting the attacks that they face, and researching, producing, and disseminating information on their struggles, strategies, and challenges:
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Mobilizing urgent responses of international solidarity for WHRDs at risk through our international and regional networks, and our active membership.
Related Content
Snippet - COP30 - International Eco-Socialist Encounter - FR
Rencontre internationale éco-socialiste
Panels, ateliers, sessions plénières et espaces d’échanges entre collectives, activistes et organisations en lutte pour prendre collectivement le chemin vers un agenda et un programme de lutte pour l’éco-socialisme.
📅 Du 8 au 11 novembre 2025
📍 Buenos Aires, Argentine
En espagnol et en portugais
ours 2021 - chapter 2 en
Chapter 2
Understanding the Context of Anti-Rights Threats
The rising power of anti-rights actors is not happening in a vacuum. Understanding the rise of ultra-nationalism, unchecked corporate power, growing repression, and diminishing civic space is key to contextualize the anti-rights threats we face today.
Snippet Kohl - Plénière | « Elle est en chemin » : Alternatives, féminismes et autre monde
Avec Dre Vandana Shiva, Dre Dilar Dirik et Nana Akosua Hanson..
Clone of Anuncio: Foro AWID 2024
¡Es hora para el próximo Foro de AWID: en 2024!
Cuando miles de feministas se unen, creamos una fuerza arrolladora de solidaridad que tiene el poder de cambiar el mundo. El Foro de AWID será un momento para que descansemos y nos recuperemos juntas, nos conectemos más allá de las fronteras y descubramos nuevas y osadas direcciones estratégicas.
La fecha y el lugar se anunciarán el próximo año, tan pronto como podamos. Estamos emocionades y sabemos que ustedes también lo están. ¡Manténganse al tanto!
¡Asegúrate de seguirnos en las redes sociales y suscríbete a nuestra lista de correo para mantenerte al día!
Diana Sacayan
Snippet - COP30 - Social Media
Follow Updates on Social Media
CFA 2023 - Hubs - EN
New
Hubs: Cross-Border Space Travel
Participants will physically gather at a number of sites outside the Bangkok venue, in different parts of the world, on each day of the Forum. All of these self-organized sites will be virtually connected to the Forum venue in Bangkok. As with individuals connecting online, Hub participants will be able to facilitate activities, participate in conversations and enjoy a rich and diverse program.
Hub locations to be announced in 2024!
Snippet Kohl - Intro Arabic
التجسيدات العابرة للحدود
قضايا تتعلق بالجسد والجندر ومختلف أنواع الجنسانية، واستكشف الروابط المتشابكة بين القضايا هذه وكونها تجاربَ مجسّدة بعمق ومكانًا يُعترض فيه على الحقوق تكون فيه الأخيرة مهدّدة في المجتمع.
تكمن قوّة الحركات النسوية في طريقة تنظيمنا وتنسيق نشاطنا، ليس ضمن مجتمعاتنا وحركاتنا فحسب إنما بالتعاون مع قضايا ومجموعات حليفة في مجال العدالة الاجتماعية. وفّرت المساحة هذه فرصًا للحركات لمشاركة طرق التنظيم واستراتيجيات تكتيكية مع بعضنا البعض وتعزيزها.
لقد أوضحت جائحة كوفيد-١٩ العالمية فشل الرأسمالية النيوليبرالي فبدا أكبر من قبل وكشفت عن التفكك الموجود في أنظمتنا أكثر من أي وقت سابق، فشددت على ضرورة بناء أنواع واقع جديد وفرص بنائها. يتطلّب التعافي النسوي الاقتصادي والاجتماعي منّا جميعًا أن ننجح كلّنا معًا. نصدر النسخة هذه من المجلة بالشراكة مع «كحل: مجلة لأبحاث الجسد والجندر»، وسنستكشف عبرها الحلول والاقتراحات وأنواع الواقع النسوية لتغيير عالمنا الحالي وكذلك أجسادنا وجنسانياتنا.
يمكنك تصفح المقالات عبر الإنترنت أو
قم بتنزيل ملف PDF
Merci
Merci de votre visite sur le site d'AWID. Pour plus d'informations sur AWID rendez-vous sur https://www.awid.org/fr
Berta Cáceres Flores
Snippet - COP30 - Ecozine card - EN
📰 Feminist Transnational Solidarity: an Antidote to Ecocide
This collaborative zine originated from a series of sharing circles that brought together feminists from around the world throughout 2022. The purpose was to exchange ideas and mutually learn how communities are responding to the climate crisis in various local contexts.
CFA 2023 - Suggested Activities Format - EN
Suggested Activity Formats
Panel: In Panel discussions, explore an issue or challenge from different perspectives, or share a learning or experience, followed by audience questions if time allows.
Talk Show: Have a more spontaneous conversation in Talk-Show style. Talk Shows can be a conversation among several people, facilitated by a talk-show host. Audience questions can determine the conversation’s direction.
Discussion: These can take the form of world cafes, fishbowls, and other methodologies that facilitate participants’ active involvement in conversations. Highly participatory.
Workshop: Interactive sessions that invite participants to build new skills in any and all areas of life and activism.
Strategy Session: This is an invitation to think through an issue or strategy, in depth, with others. A space to learn from each other: what works, what doesn’t, and how do we develop new and collective strategies to create the worlds we dream of.
Sharing Circle (also known as “Birds of a Feather”): Ideal for small groups, in a more intimate setting, to hear from each other, spark discussion and carefully address topics that may be specific, sensitive and complex.
Arts – Participatory Workshop: Participatory activities involving arts and creative expression. Whether through visual art, theater, film, mural, dance, music, collective craft or artmaking, etc., we welcome all ideas celebrating feminist art and creativity as forms of social change, healing, expression and transformation.
Arts – Performances, Installations and Exhibitions: We welcome submissions that offer Forum participants new experiences and perspectives, expand our horizons, and challenge and inspire us to think, feel and organize in new ways.
Healing: Diverse activities tailored both for groups and individuals, from learning relaxation techniques to discussing burnout prevention, from trauma-informed practices of care for our body, mind and soul to healing rifts within our movements.
#10 - Sexting like a feminist Tweets Snippet EN
I love me some poetry…
Building Feminist Economies
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.
Our Actions
Our work challenges the system from within and exposes its fundamental injustices:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Margo Okazawa-Rey
Biography
Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator and transnational feminist working on issues of militarism for nearly 30 years. She is a founder member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, the US group of the Network. She has long-standing activist commitments with Du Re Bang/My Sisters Place in South Korea and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Palestine. She also serves on the International Board of PeaceWomen Across the Globe in Bern, Switzerland and is President of the Board of Directors of Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Her foundational activist/life principle is that love is a radical act. She is also known as DJ MOR Love and Joy.
Position
President
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Cao Shunli
Eni Lestari
Biography
Eni Lestari is an Indonesian domestic worker in Hong Kong and a migrant rights activist. After escaping her abusive employer, she transformed herself from a victim into an organizer for domestic workers in particular, and migrant workers in general. In 2000, she founded the Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers (ATKI-Hong Kong) which later expanded to Macau, Taiwan, and Indonesia. She was the coordinator and the one of the spokesperson of the Asia Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB) - an alliance of grassroots migrants organisations in Hong Kong coming from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Nepal and Sri Lanka. She is also the current chairperson of International Migrants Alliance, the first-ever global alliance of grassroots migrants, immigrants, refugees, and other displaced people.
She has held important positions in various organizations including and current Regional Council member of Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), former Board Member of Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), spokesperson for Network of Indonesian Migrant Workers (JBMI), advisor for ATKI-Hong Kong and Macau as well as the Association of Returned Migrants and Families in Indonesia (KABAR BUMI). She has been an active resource person in forums organized by academics, interfaith groups, civil societies, trade unions and many others at national, regional, and international arenas.
She has actively participated in United Nations assemblies/conferences on development and migrants’ rights and was chosen as a speaker at the opening of the UN General Assembly on Large Movement of Migrants and Refugees in 2016 in New York City, USA. She received nominations and awards such as Inspirational Women by BBC 100 Women, Public Hero Award by RCTI, Indonesian Club Award, and Non-Profit Leader of Women of Influence by American Chamber Hong Kong, and Changemaker of Cathay Pacific.
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Fakhra Yunus
Rachel Mabaudi
Biography
Rachel is a financial professional with over two decades of experience. She has overseen financial affairs and projects for private and public entities, non-profits, and international non-governmental organizations. A Chartered Accountant with a Global Master’s in Business Administration, she is also a member of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants. In her spare time, Rachel designs typography art, enjoys traveling and spending time with family and friends over a bottle of wine.
Position
Finance Manager
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Lillian Masediba Ngoyi
What is the AWID International Forum?
The AWID international Forum is a gathering of 2,000 women’s rights leaders and activists from around the world. The AWID Forum is the largest recurring event of its kind, and every Forum takes place in a different country in the global South.
The AWID International Forum is both a global community event and a space of radical personal transformation. A one-of-a-kind convening, the Forum brings together feminist, women’s rights, gender justice, LBTQI+ and allied movements, in all our diversity and humanity, to connect, heal and thrive.
When people come together on a global scale, as individuals and movements, we generate a sweeping force.
Join us in Bangkok, Thailand and online in December 2024.
Myriam Merlet
March 2015: The Zero-Draft Outcome Document is released
Release of the Zero-Draft Outcome Document, March 2015
- The zero-draft outcome document (dated 16 March), prepared by the Co-facilitators, was released for discussion at the 2nd drafting session from 13-17 April 2015.
- During the opening session, the WWG on FfD called for dedicated resources for gender equality and women’s empowerment as stated in both the Monterrey Consensus and Doha Declaration,to be added into the Zero draft.
Uma Singh
What is included in registration fees?
The AWID Forum registration fees for all forum participants cover:
- Full access to all four days of the Forum
- Lunches and coffee/tea breaks during forum days
- Resource materials
- Simultaneous interpretation during plenaries and some selected breakout sessions/activities (English, French, Spanish, and local language)
- Participation in the celebration dinner/party
- Mobile app with final program and chat function
- Free Wi-Fi service in the forum premises
- Airport pick ups and hotel-venue-hotel transportation
Digna Ochoa
Marisela Escobedo Ortiz
Snippet Video C&H (EN)
Cristina Morales Jose
Snippet FEA ASOM Challenges Story 1 (EN)
CHALLENGES:
- Climate Change
- Access to financial credit Intermediaries
- Cultivation for illicit usage
Kader Ortakaya
Gloria Carolina Hernández Vásquez
Clone of Clone of Clone of Clone of Clone of Snippet - Intro WITM - FR
Where is the Money for Feminist Organizing? Survey Results
Thanks to our global feminist community! From May to August 2024, nearly 1,200 organizations working for Women's rights, gender justice, and LBTQI+ equality shared their experiences in the WITM survey. The results offer a unique picture of how feminist movements are resourced and where gaps remain.
Stay tuned for the upcoming report for more analysis!
CFA 2023 - Tiytle Hybrid like never before: in person - EN
Hybrid like never before
For the first time, the AWID Forum offers three modes of participation
#6 - Sexting like a feminist Tweets Snippet ES
¡Está siempre dispuestx a explorar nuevas experiencias!
Yo: Señor, ¿probó por el culo?
Él: No, no probé.
Yo: Piénselo, porque me gustaría cogérmelo / joderlo tal como a lxs trabajadorxs nos cogen / joden en los trabajos cuando lo que nos pagan no alcanza para vivir.
Elaine Rosa Salo
