Up to 2,000 women’s rights activists from all over the world gathered in Cape Town, South Africa between November 14-17, at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development to bolster the women’s rights movement and further advance women’s rights and gender equality globally. AWID and the Global Fund for Women presented a feature panel, “Challenges and Successes to Effective Feminist Movement Building: Case Studies from the Global Fund for Women Grantee Network.” The panel featured activists from Costa Rica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Fiji.

“Challenges and Successes” explored topics ranging from:

• Fundamentalist religious forces gaining ground around the world and increasingly controlling women’s lives;
• Young women’s leadership in global social change movements;
• The disproportionate effect of HIV and AIDS on women and children;
• The lack of emphasis on women’s rights funding in the international development community;
• Women’s increased vulnerability to labor and sexual exploitation; and
• The fragmentation of social movements around the world.

The panel took place on Saturday, November 15. Presenters, who drew on their own experiences to explore hurdles and milestones in movement building, include Global Fund for Women advisors Maria Suarez Toro, producer of the Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE) at Radio for Peace International in Costa Rica; Svetlana Durkovic, founder of the Organization Q for Promotion and Protection of Culture, Identities, and Human Rights of Queer Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina; Lina Abou-Habib, founder and executive director of the Collective for Research for Training on Development-Action in Lebanon; Katana Genge Bukuru, leader in women’s rights networks in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi; and Virisila Buadromo, Executive Director of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM).

Global Fund for Women program officers from Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Former Soviet States, the Middle East and North Africa attended the Forum, as well as activist/Global Fund for Women grantees Dr. Rose Mensah-Kuti, Regional Programme Manager of ABANTU for Development in Ghana; Pinar Ilkkaracan, co-founder and co-director of Women for Women’s Human Rights – New Ways in Istanbul; and Yanar Mohammed, founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.

One of the biggest challenges that the panel explored was the lack of funding for women’s organizations around the world.  According to a recent AWID report, “Financial Sustainability for Women’s Movements Worldwide” by Joanna Kerr, almost two-thirds of the 1,000 surveyed women’s rights organizations have annual budgets of $50,000 or less, which explains why small women’s rights organizations are perceived as not having the capacity to grow and why more than half of the survey respondents are receiving less funding since 2000.

The Global Fund for Women is the world’s largest foundation focused solely on women’s human rights.  Since 1987, the Global Fund for Women has been funding women-led organizations who are striving to create a world in which women and girls enjoy their full human rights.

AWID is an international, multi-generational, feminist, membership organization committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women’s human rights.