Happy International Women’s Day!

Happy International Women’s Day!

CRIAW-ICREF wishes to acknowledge and celebrate all the awesome feminists doing their tireless work today and those who have come before us! But we also wish to highlight that IWD is not just a day of celebration but it is a day to call for action on women’s rights for all women!  

A 2019 factsheet produced by CRIAW-ICREF on Women’s Organizations’ Capacity for Action highlights funding instability as a major issue for women’s organizations regardless of size or geographic location. This funding instability hampers the ability of women’s organizations to do advocacy to speak out about issues and challenge systemic barriers.

As feminists we all know how much work is still left to do.  Women’s organizations have played and continue to play an crucial role in advocating for women’s rights and providing essential services that otherwise wouldn’t be there. The move away from a core funding model to project funding over the past 25 years has positioned the important work of women’s equality as something that can be achieved through short-term project deliverables– which we know it cannot.

So today we wish to acknowledge the importance of funding women’s organizations to ensure we can continue to advocate for all the structural and systemic changes needed for women’s equality!