Dear Feminist Friends,
| We hope this message finds you well and we would like to extend our warmest welcome to our new subscribers! We are so grateful that we had the chance to meet many of you in Kigali during the Women Deliver conference. We were thrilled that you passed by our booth (shout out to Open Society Foundations for generously donating that space to us and to Sonaksha for helping us bring it to life artistically), met RESURJ members and friends, and filled our space with your energy, fierceness, genuine enthusiasm, insights about your work and – most importantly – commitment to join us in this transformative journey of Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Justice. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, said hi, signed up for our newsletter, and took a cute picture. |
Here are some of our collective reflections about Women Deliver 2023
5 THINGS WE LIKED
1. We co-organized a convening with young African feminists in collaboration with Tanga Community and Hope for Single Mothers with Disability in Rwanda ahead of the Women Deliver conference. As this was the first time for Women Deliver to be hosted in Africa, we anticipated that participation from South feminists would be larger and hence wanted to take the opportunity to connect and meet with African feminists, deepen our understanding of our current struggles and their intersections, and co-build transnational solidarity pathways. It was especially important for us to create this space together and reaffirm our feminist values & share our analyses and strategies with one another ahead of the conference.
Watch snippets of the convening here
2. The conference was an incredible opportunity for us to meet, connect, learn and build solidarity with hundreds of feminists from the Global South, many of whom signed up for our newsletter and expressed interest in engaging with our work in the future. A shout out to Purposeful who invited us into their Girls’ Resistance Space at the conference to host some discussions.
3. As usual, RESURJ used this space too as an opportunity to share our Beyond Criminalization thought leadership work with a wider audience and engage with feminists who are grappling with limiting and uprooting gender-based violence beyond the criminal justice system. We held an interactive session about the limits of the criminal justice system, titled Feminist Circle on Justice, along with Balance and Vecinas Feministas, in which we workshopped case studies from the Injusta Justicia campaign and challenged younger feminists to reimagine what justice can look like. We also co-organized a virtual session titled Does Criminalization Mean Justice?, along with the Hidden Pockets Collective and Partners in Law and Development (PLD) from India and Education as a Vaccine (EVA) from Nigeria.This session also saw an insightful intervention from Tània Verge, the Catalonian Minister of Equality and Feminisms.
4. We appreciated the focus of a number of sessions on resourcing feminist movements, particularly in the Global South. We joined several sessions where governments, private philanthropy, feminist and women’s funds and feminist civil society came together to discuss structural and pervasive barriers in getting direct, flexible and long-term funding as well as political support to feminist movements.
5. We were heartened to see a number of younger South feminists rooted in local and national organizing taking the stage during plenaries, speaking truth to power. More of this please.
5 THINGS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER
1. Technical support for virtual sessions. The lack of support affected accessibility and participation in our virtual event. There was also a lack of proper internet access and dedicated space inside the conference venue to organize and attend virtual sessions in general, which was disappointing considering that the conference was supposed to be hybrid.
2. Women Deliver is more of a networking space than a political space. And there can be better communication of this ahead of time so that participants who are investing in attending the conference can adjust their expectations and understand the nature of the space better. Networking is an important part of movement building, so we encourage the conference organizers to own that aspect more explicitly so that there is no confusion about what feminists can expect out of the conference.
3. We hoped to see better care and support for activists attending. RESURJ was able to support a feminist leader to accommodate her health needs related to her travel since the organizers wouldn’t and we also changed accommodation for a young feminist activist who was given lodging outside the transportation coverage and by herself in an unsafe area.
4. What good is representation with no material change! Conference registration fees were expensive for local, regional, and global south feminists to attend. What are other models we can explore for fees because assigning us to the World Bank’s income categories hides and avoids intersectional inequalities the same way that those categories do in macroeconomic policies.
5. As much as we appreciate the intention behind trying to accommodate as many side events as possible, those that started as early as 6.30 AM were understandably poorly attended, rendering it a disempowering exercise for everyone involved. Experimenting with other formats like town halls and caucusing that can help more people get heard and seen.
3 THINGS WE WERE CONCERNED ABOUT
1. Featuring world leaders for the sake of featuring world leaders. We believe feminist power can only be built from the ground up, through our movements and organizing, and it was concerning to see Women Deliver draw power through dubious political leaders who were in turn applauded for their regressive positions. And even as there was an outcry about the President of Hungary and a halfhearted response from organizers, we noted that the concerns of feminists from Senegal about their President were not heard quite the same way.
2. How the conference was used as a space for closed-door negotiations and deals amongst powerful governments, private philanthropy and INGOs, with some of us being invited into those spaces to give credibility to those rather than as equals in our fight against anti-rights movements. When our clarion call is for feminist movements to be directly funded as much as possible and to use movement intermediaries such as feminist and women’s funds, it is concerning to see INGOs try to pose as movement actors and claim resources that will then barely trickle down to those who are in the thick of this fight on a daily basis.
3. From the conference name tags of those who specified their gender beyond pre-assigned categories being designated and printed as “Other” on the conference badges – instead of their preferred pronouns – to endless rhetoric about applauding male feminists and dated sentiments such as “special place in hell for women who don’t support women” being repeated by speakers. Even as organizers took steps to ensure inclusion and safety of LGBTIQ+ participants, we noted with concern how cis-het norms defined the space, resulting in othering and not-so-intersectional binaries.
How was your experience with Women Deliver?
Got any reflections that you’d like to share with us? Email us at comms@resurj.org
We’d love to hear from you as we continue to unpack our own encounters there.
With power and love,
RESURJ