What works to strengthen feminist movements

We are living through an unprecedented time of backlash against women’s rights. Well-funded anti-gender movements are on the rise, fuelled by authoritarian, far right and conservative regimes. These movements against gender equality received an estimated three times more funding (USD$3.7 billion) than feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements combined (USD$1.2 billion) in 2020. Women’s rights funding has also been drastically cut as part of the backlash. In a report released this year by UN Women, they found that 90% of the women’s rights organisations (WROs) surveyed had been impacted by funding cuts to global aid. The results of this financial crisis are dire, with 47% of the surveyed WROs expecting to shut down within six months if current conditions persist. Already, 72% have laid off staff and over half (51%) have suspended programming, with gender-based violence related programmes being the hardest hit.  

The stronger and more sustainable feminist movements are, the more able they are to resist the widespread backlash on women’s rights, adapt to changing realities and defend hard won rights.  

Womankind’s Movement Strengthening Fund (MSF) has been investing in the relationships and processes that sustain and grow feminist movements that are inclusive, intersectional, political and caring for the past five years. MSF complements other schemes in the global eco-system of feminist funding and is a critical part of Womankind’s strategic approach to strengthening feminist movements and goal of ‘resourcing the feminist revolution’. 

Today, Womankind launches a brief, sharing learning from five years of feminist, flexible grant-making to strengthen feminist movements. This brief explains the purpose of the fund, where grants were given and to whom. Critically, it shares insights into how MSF grantees have interpreted movement strengthening needs in their own contexts. It shows how grantees have used flexible grants to make significant and meaningful impacts to strengthen their movements. Womankind has also been supporting cross-movement learning by curating online spaces with grantee partners to learn together and further deepen our collective knowledge of feminist movements.  

In this brief we explore five approaches that share partners’ insights on what works to strengthen feminist movements in different contexts using limited resources. Insights have come directly from partners’ own learning, as documented in their reports and publications, which is also a contribution to Womankind’s strategic intent to decolonise our knowledge creation and documentation practice and centre partner voices.