Young Feminist Activism
Organizing creatively, facing an increasing threat
Young feminist activists play a critical role in women’s rights organizations and movements worldwide by bringing up new issues that feminists face today. Their strength, creativity and adaptability are vital to the sustainability of feminist organizing.
At the same time, they face specific impediments to their activism such as limited access to funding and support, lack of capacity-building opportunities, and a significant increase of attacks on young women human rights defenders. This creates a lack of visibility that makes more difficult their inclusion and effective participation within women’s rights movements.
A multigenerational approach
AWID’s young feminist activism program was created to make sure the voices of young women are heard and reflected in feminist discourse. We want to ensure that young feminists have better access to funding, capacity-building opportunities and international processes. In addition to supporting young feminists directly, we are also working with women’s rights activists of all ages on practical models and strategies for effective multigenerational organizing.
Our Actions
We want young feminist activists to play a role in decision-making affecting their rights by:
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Fostering community and sharing information through the Young Feminist Wire. Recognizing the importance of online media for the work of young feminists, our team launched the Young Feminist Wire in May 2010 to share information, build capacity through online webinars and e-discussions, and encourage community building.
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Researching and building knowledge on young feminist activism, to increase the visibility and impact of young feminist activism within and across women’s rights movements and other key actors such as donors.
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Promoting more effective multigenerational organizing, exploring better ways to work together.
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Supporting young feminists to engage in global development processes such as those within the United Nations
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Collaboration across all of AWID’s priority areas, including the Forum, to ensure young feminists’ key contributions, perspectives, needs and activism are reflected in debates, policies and programs affecting them.
Related Content
En su lucha por los derechos humanos enfrentan la injusticia en América Latina
Este año honramos a 19 defensoras de la región de América Latina y el Caribe. De ellas, 16 fueron asesinadas, incluyendo a 6 periodistas y 4 defensoras LGBTQI. Únete a nosotras en la conmemoración de sus vidas y trabajo, compartiendo los memes aquí incluidos con tus colegas, amistades y redes; y tuiteando las etiquetas #WHRDTribute y #16Días.
Por favor, haz click en cada imagen de abajo para ver una versión más grande y para descargar como un archivo.












Devo fazer alguma preparação para responder ao inquérito?
Tendo em conta que o inquérito WITM foca-se nas realidades do financiamento de organizações feministas, a maioria das perguntas aborda o tópico do financiamento do seu grupo entre 2021-2023. Será preciso ter essas informações facilmente acessíveis para preencher o inquérito (por exemplo, os seus orçamentos anuais e as principais fontes de financiamento).
Yelena Grigoriyeva
Yelena Grigoriyeva, a menudo conocida entre sus amigxs como Lena, fue una destacada defensora de los derechos LGBT en Rusia.
Formó parte de movimientos democráticos, anti-guerra y LGBT. En su activismo, fue una crítica feroz del Presidente Vladimir Putin y su administración, y expresó su oposición a la anexión por parte de Rusia de la península de Crimea de Ucrania y al maltrato de prisionerxs.
Yelena se declaró bisexual a principios de 2019. "Su salida del armario fue una sorpresa para mí, y no la aprobé. Le dije: ‘Escucha, Lena, ya estás en la mira por tu actividad política. Te acabas de clavar otro blanco en el pecho’". - Olga Smirnova
Yelena, de hecho, recibió múltiples amenazas de muerte y, según algunxs de sus conocidxs, figuraba en un sitio web homofóbico que instaba a sus visitantes a que persiguieran a las personas LGBT. Yelena denunció las amenazas a la policía, pero el Estado ruso no le proporcionó ningún tipo de protección.
Sin embargo, Yelena, a pesar de vivir en una sociedad en la que la oposición política, así como lxs integrantes de la comunidad LGBT y lxs defensores de sus derechos, se enfrentan a una violencia continua y creciente, siguió haciendo campaña por la justicia social y la igualdad.
"No se perdió ni una sola acción. Y la detuvieron tantas veces que hasta perdí la cuenta", Olga Smirnova (compañera activista de la oposición y amiga).
Yelena fue asesinada el 21 de julio de 2019, cerca de su casa. Las autoridades detuvieron a una persona sospechosa pero, según algunas fuentes, muchxs amigxs y compañerxs activistas creen que es un chivo expiatorio y que, en realidad, se trata de un asesinato político deliberado.
Para los familiares y amigxs de Yelena, su caso sigue sin resolverse aunque la persona sospechosa haya confesado.
En 2013, Rusia aprobó una ley que prohíbe la difusión de lo que describió como "propaganda gay". En 2014, Human Rights Watch publicó un informe al respecto.
Snippet FEA EoS The Cover (FR)

La puissante
Autoprotection et renforcement
WHRDs from the South and Southeast Asian region
7 Women Human Rights Defenders from across the South and Southeast Asian region are honored in this year’s Online Tribute. These defenders have made key contributions to advancing human and women’s rights, indigenous people’s rights, and the right to education. These WHRDs were lawyers, women’s rights activists, scholars, and politicians. Please join AWID in commemorating t their work and legacy by sharing the memes below with your colleagues, networks and friends and by using the hashtags #WHRDTribute and #16Days.
Please click on each image below to see a larger version and download as a file







Kader Ortakaya
هل مشاركتي سريّة؟
أكيد. سيتم محي اجوبتك بعد عملية معالجة المعطيات وتحليلها وسيتم استعمالها لأهداف بحثية فقط. لن تتم أبداً مشاركة المعطيات خارج AWID وسيتم معالجتها فقط عن طريق طاقم AWID والمستشارات/ين اللواتي/ اللذين يعملن/وا في مشروع "أين المال" معنا. خصوصيتكم/ن وسرّيتكم/ن هي في أعلى سلم أولوياتنا. سياسة الخصوصية متواجدة هنا.
Magaly Quintana
Magaly Quintana était connue de nombreuses personnes au Nicaragua comme « La Maga » (la magicienne). Historienne et activiste féministe, elle était une indéfectible défenseure des droits des femmes, réclamant justice pour les victimes de féminicides.
Magaly était fortement engagée dans la documentation et la collecte de statistiques sur les femmes et les filles tuées dans le cadre de la violence sexuelle dans le pays.
« Elle s’employait à reconstituer la vie de chacune d’entre elles, de leur famille, pour montrer ces vies qui avaient été détruites », Dora María Téllez.
Magaly avait également critiqué le gouvernement pour sa réforme de la loi 779 sur la violence à l’égard des femmes. Résultat du travail acharné des mouvements de femmes nicaraguayens, cette loi incluait – avant sa réforme – d’importantes dispositions criminalisant le féminicide. Elle avançait que les réformes législatives avaient affaibli la loi et restreint la définition des féminicides à des homicides, rendant ainsi « invisibles » les crimes violents perpétrés contre les femmes.
Magaly a commencé à mener des actions féministes au début des années 1980. Directrice du Catholic Women for the Right to Choose, elle a défendu le droit à l’avortement thérapeutique après son interdiction en 2006, de même que soutenu les manifestations contre le gouvernement de Daniel Ortega en 2018.
Née en mai 1952, Magaly est décédée en mai 2019.
« Nous nous reverrons plus tard, ma très chère Magaly Quintana. Merci beaucoup, merci pour l’héritage que tu nous laisses. Nous te reverrons, aussi forte et puissante que toujours. », Erika Guevara Rosas (Directrice américaine d’Amnesty International)
Snippet FEA Ecofeminism (EN)
WEST AFRICA
NOUS SOMMES LA SOLUTION
We are the Solution
ECOFEMINISM:
Respect for all we have around us
Before you begin
Before starting the WITM research methodology, it is important you prepare the background and know what to expect.
Capacity
With AWID’s WITM research methodology, we recommend that you first review the entire toolkit.
While this toolkit is designed to democratize WITM research, there are capacity constraints related to resources and research experience that may affect your organization’s ability use this methodology.
Use the “Ready to Go?” Worksheet to assess your readiness to begin your own WITM research. The more questions you can answer on this worksheet, the more prepared you are to undertake your research.
Trust
Before beginning any research, we recommend that you assess your organization’s connections and trust within your community.
In many contexts, organizations may be hesitant to openly share financial data with others for reasons ranging from concerns about how the information will be used, to fear of funding competition and anxiety over increasing government restrictions on civil society organizations.
As you build relationships and conduct soft outreach in the lead-up to launching your research, ensuring that your objectives are clear will be useful in creating trust. Transparency will allow participants to understand why you are collecting the data and how it will benefit the entire community.
We highly recommend that you ensure data is collected confidentially and shared anonymously. By doing so, participants will be more comfortable sharing sensitive information with you.
First step
We also recommend referring to our “Ready to Go?” Worksheet to assess your own progress.
Tonya Gonella Frichner
Как долго будет доступен опрос?
Опрос будет доступен до конца августа 2024 года. Пожалуйста, заполните его в течение этого срока, чтобы ваши ответы были включены в анализ.
Doris Valenzuela Angulo
Doris Valenzuela Angulo was an Afro-descendant social activist, leader and human rights defender from Buenaventura, Colombia. She was part of Communities Building Peace in the Territories (CONPAZ), a national network of organizations in communities affected by armed conflict that advocate for non-violence and socio-environmental justice.
Doris defied constant paramilitary violence and pressures from mega projects to displace her community and state collusion. Faced with one of the most difficult contexts in her country, she played a leadership role in an unprecedented initiative of non-violent resistance called Puente Nayero Humanitarian Space, an urban place for community cohesion, safety, creativity and collective action.
This unique non-violent struggle of the families that belonged to Puente Nayero Humanitarian Space, attracted attention and support from both local and international agencies. By September 2014, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had granted precautionary protection measures to the community ordering the Colombian State to adopt necessary measures to preserve their lives and personal integrity. However, the threats and violence from the paramilitaries continued. Doris focused her energies on preventing forced recruitment of children and young people by the neo-paramilitaires, continuing on despite the murder of her son Cristian Dainer Aragón Valenzuela in July 2015. Doris also became a target, continuously receiving threats for her activism and the work she did.
The continued aggression and threats against her life forced Doris to leave Colombia. She was residing in Spain from February 2017 to February 2018, as part of the Amnesty International temporary protection program for human rights defenders at risk. In April 2018, Doris was murdered in Murcia, Spain by her ex-partner. She was only 39 years old.
Tributes:
"Doris, spending a whole year with you has taught us how a person can have the ability to transform and generate hope in the face of deeply negative and devastating events during your life...We continue with our commitment in the defense of all human rights. Your courage and your light will always guide us.” - Montserrat Román, Amnesty International Grupo La Palma
Excerpt from “Words for Doris Valenzuela Angulo” by Elsa López
"..You knew it. You always knew. And in spite of everything you stood firm against so many injustices, so many miseries, so much persecution. You stood up, haughty and fierce, against those who wanted to make you again abandon your hopes, humble yourself and surrender. Standing up you cried out for your freedom and ours that was yours. Nothing and no one paralyzed your efforts to change the world and make it more generous and livable. You, live among us, more alive today than ever among us despite death. Always live by your gestures, your courage, your greatness when crying for a promised land that you came to invoke with each of your cries for all the deserts you inhabited. You. Always alive. Doris Valenzuela Angulo.
They are only words. I know. I know it too. But the words unite us, protect us, give us strength and encouragement to continue walking towards the light that you defended so much…”
Snippet FEA Mariama Sonko (EN)
This is Mariama Sonko, an inspiring small-scale rural farmer, eco-feminist and a woman human rights defender.
She lives in Niaguiss, a town in the southwest of Senegal. Growing up in a family and community of rural farmers, she witnessed the essential role of women in food production and seed preservation from a very early age, while also being immersed in the rhythms and working of the land. Mariama has been defending local agricultural knowledge and peasant practices since the 1990s. As a mother of five children, the food she grows herself is the main source of sustenance for her family.
She is currently the president of “Nous Sommes la Solution'' and is involved in promoting agroecological practices and family farming, encouraging food sovereignty, biodiversity and farmer seed preservation, and demanding equitable access to resources and land for women across West Africa.
Source: AWID’s Feminist Realities Festival Crear | Résister | Transform - Day 2/ 2ème jour/ 2º día
4. Collect and analyze your data
This section will guide you on how to ensure your research findings are representative and reliable.
In this section:
- Collect your data
1. Before launch
2. Launch
3. During launch- Prepare your data for analysis
1. Clean your data
2. Code open-ended responses
3. Remove unecessary data
4. Make it safe- Create your topline report
- Analyze your data
1. Statistical programs
2. Suggested points for analysis
Collect your data
1. Before launch
- First determine the best way to reach your survey population.
For example, if you want to focus on indigenous women’s rights organizers, do you know who the key networks are? Do you have contacts there, people who can introduce you to these organizations or ways of reaching them? - Determine if your key population can be easily reached with an online survey, if you need to focus on paper survey distribution and collection or a mix of both. This decision is very important to ensure accessibility and inclusiveness.
- Be prepared! Prior to advertizing, create a list of online spaces where you can promote your survey.
If you are distributing paper versions, create a list of events, spaces and methods for distributing and collecting results. - Plan your timeline in advance, so you can avoid launching your survey during major holidays or long vacation periods.
- Make it easy for your advisors and partners to advertize the survey – offer them pre-written Twitter, Facebook and email messages that they can copy and paste.
2. Launch
- Send the link to the survey via email through your organization’s email databases.
- Advertize on your organization’s social media. Similar to your newsletter, you can regularly advertize the survey while it is open.
- If your organization is hosting events that reach members of your survey population, this is a good space to advertize the survey and distribute paper versions as needed.
- Invite your advisors to promote the survey with their email lists and ask them to copy you so you are aware of their promotional messages. Remember to send them follow-up reminders if they’ve agreed to disseminate.
- Approach funders to share your survey with their grantees. It is in their interest that their constituencies respond to a survey that will improve their own work in the field.
3. During launch
- Keep the survey open for a minimum of four weeks to ensure everyone has time to take it and you have time to widely advertize it.
- Send reminders through your email databases and your partners databases asking people to participate in the survey. To avoid irritating recipients with too many emails, we recommend sending two additional reminder emails: one at midway point while your survey is open and another a week before your survey closes.
- As part of your outreach, remember to state that you are only collecting one response per organization. This will make cleaning your data much easier when you are preparing it for analysis.
- Save an extra week! Halfway through the open window for survey taking, check your data set. How have you done so far? Run initial numbers to see how many groups have responded, from which locations, etc. If you see gaps, reach out to those specific populations. Also, consider extending your deadline by a week – if you do so, include this extension deadline in one of your reminder emails, informing people know there is more time to complete the survey. Many answers tend to come in during the last week of the survey or after the extended deadline.
If you also plan to collect data from applications sent to grant-making institutions, this is a good time to reach out them.
When collecting this data, consider what type of applications you would like to review. Your research framing will guide you in determining this.
Also, it may be unnecessary to see every application sent to the organization – instead, it will be more useful and efficient to review only eligible applications (regardless of whether they were funded).
You can also ask grant-making institutions to share their data with you.
Prepare your data for analysis
Your survey has closed and now you have all this information! Now you need to ensure your data is as accurate as possible.
Depending on your sample size and amount of completed surveys, this step can be lengthy. Tapping into a strong pool of detail-oriented staff will speed up the process and ensure greater accuracy at this stage.
Also, along with your surveys, you may have collected data from applications sent to grant-making institutions. Use these same steps to sort that data as well. Do not get discouraged if you cannot compare the two data sets! Funders collect different information from what you collected in the surveys. In your final research report and products, you can analyze and present the datasets (survey versus grant-making institution data) separately.
1. Clean your data
- Resolve and remove duplications: If there is more than one completed survey for one organization, reach out to the organization and determine which one is the most accurate.
- Remove ineligible responses: Go through each completed survey and remove any responses that did not properly answer the question. Replace it with “null”, thus keeping it out of your analysis.
- Consistently format numerical data: For example, you may remove commas, decimals and dollar signs from numerical responses. Financial figures provided in different currencies may need to be converted.
2. Code open-ended responses
There are two styles of open-ended responses that require coding.
Questions with open-ended responses
For these questions, you will need to code responses in order to track trends.
Some challenges you will face with this is:
- People will not use the exact same words to describe similar responses
- Surveys with multiple language options will require translation and then coding
- Staff capacity to review and code each open-ended response.
If using more than one staff member to review and code, you will need to ensure consistency of coding. Thus, this is why we recommend limiting your open-ended questions and as specific as possible for open-ended questions you do ask.
For example, if you had the open-ended question “What specific challenges did you face in fundraising this year?” and some common responses cite “lack of staff,” or “economic recession,” you will need to code each of those responses so you can analyze how many participants are responding in a similar way.
For closed-end questions
If you provided the participant with the option of elaborating on their response, you will also need to “up-code” these responses.
For several questions in the survey, you may have offered the option of selecting the category “Other” With “Other” options, it is common to offer a field in which the participant can elaborate.
You will need to “up-code” such responses by either:
- Converting open-ended responses to the correct existing categories (this is known as “up-coding”). As a simple example, consider your survey asks participants “what is your favorite color?” and you offer the options “blue,” “green,” and “other.” There may be some participants that choose “other” and in their explanation they write “the color of the sky is my favorite color.” You would then “up-code” answers like these to the correct category, in this case, the category “blue.”
- Creating a new category if there are several “others” that have a common theme. (This is similar to coding the first type of open-ended responses). Consider the previous example question of favorite color. Perhaps many participants chose “other” and then wrote “red” is their favorite. In this case, you would create a new category of “red” to track all responses that answered “red.”
- Removing “others” that do not fit any existing or newly created categories.
3. Remove unecessary data
Analyze the frequency of the results
For each quantitative question, you can decide whether you should remove the top or bottom 5% or 1% to prevent outliers* from skewing your results. You can also address the skewing effect of outliers by using median average rather than the mean average. Calculate the median by sorting responses in order, and selecting the number in the middle. However, keep in mind that you may still find outlier data useful. It will give you an idea of the range and diversity of your survey participants and you may want to do case studies on the outliers.
* An outlier is a data point that is much bigger or much smaller than the majority of data points. For example, imagine you live in a middle-class neighborhood with one billionaire. You decide that you want to learn what the range of income is for middle-class families in your neighborhood. In order to do so, you must remove the billionaire income from your dataset, as it is an outlier. Otherwise, your mean middle-class income will seem much higher than it really is.
Remove the entire survey for participants who do not fit your target population. Generally you can recognize this by the organizations’ names or through their responses to qualitative questions.
4. Make it safe
To ensure confidentiality of the information shared by respondents, at this stage you can replace organization names with a new set of ID numbers and save the coding, matching names with IDs in a separate file.
With your team, determine how the coding file and data should be stored and protected.
For example, will all data be stored on a password-protected computer or server that only the research team can access?
Create your topline report
A topline report will list every question that was asked in your survey, with the response percentages listed under each question. This presents the collective results of all individual responses.
Tips:
- Consistency is important: the same rules should be applied to every outlier when determining if it should stay or be removed from the dataset.
- For all open (“other”) responses that are up-coded, ensure the coding matches. Appoint a dedicated point person to randomly check codes for consistency and reliability and recode if necessary.
- If possible, try to ensure that you can work at least in a team of two, so that there is always someone to check your work.
Analyze your data
Now that your data is clean and sorted, what does it all mean? This is the fun part where you begin to analyze for trends.
Are there prominent types of funders (government versus corporate)? Are there regions that receive more funding? Your data will reveal some interesting information.
1. Statistical programs
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Smaller samples (under 150 responses) may be done in-house using an Excel spreadsheet.
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Larger samples (above 150 responses) may be done in-house using Excel if your analysis will be limited to tallying overall responses, simple averages or other simple analysis.
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If you plan to do more advanced analysis, such as multivariate analysis, then we recommend using statistical software such as SPSS, Stata or R.
NOTE: SPSS and Stata are expensive whereas R is free.
All three types of software require staff knowledge and are not easy to learn quickly.
Try searching for interns or temporary staff from local universities. Many students must learn statistical analysis as part of their coursework and may have free access to SPSS or Stata software through their university. They may also be knowledgeable in R, which is free to download and use.
2. Suggested points for analysis
- Analysis of collective budget sizes
- Analysis of budget sizes by region or type of organization
- Most common funders
- Total amount of all funding reported
- Total percentages of type of funding (corporate, government, etc)
- Most funded issues/populations
- Changes over time in any of these results.
Previous step
Next step

Estimated time:
• 2 - 3 months
People needed:
• 1 or more research person(s)
• Translator(s), if offering survey in multiple languages
• 1 or more person(s) to assist with publicizing survey to target population
• 1 or more data analysis person(s)
Resources needed:
• List of desired advisors: organizations, donors, and activists
• Optional: an incentive prize to persuade people to complete your survey
• Optional: an incentive for your advisors
Resources available:
Survey platforms:
• Survey Monkey
• Survey Gizmo (Converts to SPSS for analysis very easily)
Examples:
• 2011 WITM Global Survey
• Sample of WITM Global Survey
• Sample letter to grantmakers requesting access to databases
Visualising Information for Advocacy:
• Cleaning Data Tools
• Tools to present your data in compelling ways
• Tutorial: Gentle Introduction to Cleaning Data