Policy and Advocacy in 2025/26

Our policy and advocacy work is partner-centred, decolonial and grounded in an intersectional feminist perspective. Through this, we’re working to address discrimination against women and girls and how it shows up in laws, policies and practice. We fight the inequality that stops women from meaningfully engaging in decision-making, living safely, being autonomous, and accessing the resources they need. 

In 2025/26: 

• We worked with our partners to address the limited participation and leadership of women and girls in decision-making spaces at all levels. 

• We called for change in policies that limit access to economic rights for women – driven by unpaid care work, unjust tax systems and limited public spending on the priorities that give women autonomy over their lives and resources. 

• We advocated for better access to flexible, trust-based funding for organisations, activists and movements in our focus countries to advance advocacy priorities at all levels. 

Here are some examples of the impact of our feminist advocacy. 

Demanding change for trafficking survivors

Each year, tens of thousands of Nepali women are trafficked into forced sex work or labour. When reintegrating into society, social stigma makes it difficult for survivors to speak openly and participate fully in public life. Her Voice Fund (HVF) grantee Sunita Foundation exists to change this. 

Between 2024 and 2026, the foundation worked with survivors of human trafficking in Nepal to advocate for their reintegration into society and work. As a result of regular meetings and advocacy — expertly planned around municipal planning and budgeting processes — two local government authorities (Melamchi and Dupcheshwor Rural) increased their commitment to this issue. 

In 2025/26, both municipalities introduced dedicated budget lines for survivors of human trafficking. This was a key step toward more systematic and reliable government support. 

A key learning was that regular and long-term engagement with local government is necessary to turn policy commitments into real budgets and services. 

At the same time, survivors who took part in leadership development activities became more confident and actively engaged with local government, with some successfully accessing municipal health support and livelihood programmes. 

Survivors’ advocacy secured both a concrete shift in local government practice, and a growing recognition of survivors as active citizens who can speak for their needs and access their rights. 

Despite these successes, challenges remain. Sunita Foundation will continue to advocate for these policy commitments to be put into practice, and for the budget set aside for survivor reintegration to meet the actual need. 

Advocacy to end tech-facilitated gender-based violence

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is no longer just an emerging risk but an escalating reality targeting, silencing and harming women and girls. Throughout 2025/26, we strengthened our advocacy efforts on TFGBV, building on our feminist approach to ending violence against women and girls. Rather than treating online abuse as a standalone digital issue, our work situates TFGBV within the wider continuum of gender-based violence and is grounded in partner-led evidence, lived experience and feminist movement expertise. This included: 

• The #SafeInEverySpace campaign, where every Thursday we shared messages in solidarity with survivors of gender-based violence and called for safety, dignity and justice. Reaching over 300,000 people, the campaign covered TFGBV and its links to women’s participation and leadership, women’s economic rights and femicide. 

• Our International Women’s Day (IWD) campaign ‘Reboot the online system, make it safer’, where we launched a feminist playbook for responding to TFGBV and the research report ‘Unsafe by Design: A Tech-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence Analysis’. The report and playbook provide a framework for advocacy and action, offering strategic guidance to women’s rights organisations, policymakers, and other decision-makers to strengthen their commitments and collective efforts to address TFGBV. The two publications serve as tools for feminist organisations to hold governments accountable for their commitments to ending violence against women and girls. The playbook was launched at an International Women’s Day event in London and in New York at the UN’s 70th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70). 

• The CSW70 launch brought together five partners as panellists: Centre for Rights, Education and Awareness (CREAW), FARAGEER, Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), Femicide Count Kenya and Feminist Dalit Organisation (FEDO). The discussion advocated for institutional reforms, resource allocation and strengthened national and global legal frameworks by recognising TFGBV as part of the continuum of violence against women and girls. 

• We brought our TFGBV work to life through artivism, collaborating with Marianne Oldham, a UK-based director, on the creation of a powerful play ‘The Malfi Project’ in London. Our work on TFGBV was picked up by BBC Africa Daily and BBC World Service (67 million listeners), the BBC Tech Life podcast (a reach of 148 million people), The Independent and The Guardian. 

Getting our voice heard on international media platforms is an important part of our work of influencing a feminist agenda. 

Strengthening the movement through women’s participation and leadership

Womankind’s movement strengthening approach recognises that sustainable change is driven by resourced feminist leaders connected to broader movements. 

In 2025/26 we published ‘Violence Against Women in Politics – Feminist Perspectives from Uganda, Kenya & Ethiopia’, a policy brief and factsheet that examined the issue of violence against women in politics and provides clear recommendations for addressing it more effectively. 

We launched the research with a webinar in October 2025, looking at lessons from different contexts and how leaders can use those lessons to build more inclusive, transformative movements. 

Moderated by Purity Kagwiria, Founder of the Pan African Girls Fund, the conversation was grounded in a shared conviction: when feminists lead, societies transform. 

From the webinar, there was a recommendation to convene in person. In December 2025, in collaboration with the Pan African Girls Fund, we brought together 17 feminist partners and allies in Kenya for a discussion on flexible funding, feminist leadership and participation. Together, we refined an agenda for future learning and began the ideation of a movement-strengthening-focused community of practice.