Association for Women's Rights in Development


The Association for Women's Rights in Development, formerly the Association for Women in Development, is an international, feminist, membership organization committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women's human rights established in 1982.

Activities

A dynamic network of women and men around the world, AWID members are researchers, academics, students, educators, activists, business people, policy-makers, development practitioners, funders, and more. The former Executive Director of AWID was Lydia Alpízar Durán, with Myrna Cunningham Kain as Board President.
Since 2016 the organization has been led by Hakima Abbas and Cindy Clark as Co-Executive Directors, with American feminist author Charlotte Bunch joining as Board President. Formerly headquartered in Washington D.C., the organization now has offices in Toronto, Mexico City and Cape Town and staff working across the globe.
A policy brief, Illicit Financial Flows: Why we should claim these resources for gender, economic and social justice was issued to explain stricter financial regulations which would replace corporate privileges against the people and planet. In that, initial policies to support feminist and gender justice organizations were also recommended to influence relevant decision-making and to involve policy-makers, not limited to mentioning potentially complement bodies as well as those existing engagement and positions.

Focus area

AWID works on issues of gender justice and women's human rights worldwide through supporting women's rights advocates, organizations and movements, granted by the Channel Foundation since 2011 with initial travel grant program for the "12th AWID International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development: Transforming Economic Power to Advance Women’s Rights and Justice" which was held in Istanbul, Turkey in April of 2012. The organization has been focusing its work around five priority areas: Resourcing Women's Rights, Economic Justice, Challenging Religious Fundamentalism, Women Human Rights Defenders, Young Feminist Activism.The global membership with over 5000 members consists of both individual and institutional, coming from 164 countries.

Publications