Asia Pacific Feminist Forum 2024 unites over 500 grassroot feminist voices across regions to build a Just Future

For immediate release: 12 September 2024
Edz dela Cruz, APWLD Information and Communications Officer
Email: edz@apwld.org, Signal/WhatsApp: +66 625718400
Ruiyao Luo, APFF Communications Consultant 
Email: apffcomms@apwld.org, Signal/WhatsApp: +92 725857818

Asia Pacific Feminist Forum 2024 unites over 500 grassroot feminist voices across regions to build a Just Future

Chiang Mai, Thailand – Under the theme, “Feminist World-Building: Creative Energies, Collective Journeys”, the Asia Pacific Feminist Forum (APFF) 2024 brings together over 500 feminists, activists, and Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) from across Asia and the Pacific region, to unpack structural forces behind inequalities in the world today, and to explore a collective journey towards a feminist world. 

The APFF is a triennial event organised by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), gathering feminist voices from across Asia and the Pacific. Since the first Forum in 2011, APFF has served as a space for reflection, learning, and mobilisation, aiming to build solidarities across movements, generations, and regions in the Asia Pacific region.

After the postponement due to the global pandemic, APFF, again, creates a space for Asia-Pacific feminists to connect and build solidarity over plenary sessions, 51 workshops, 16 feminist exhibitions and side-events. 

From 12 to 14 September in Chiang Mai, Thailand, hundreds of feminists, activists and WHRDs from the region will not only analyse and reflect on collective movement building, but also celebrate and share their creative energies to forge a path towards a more just and equal feminist world.

“We are working very hard to make sure that the theme of ‘creative energies’ is being translated throughout the APFF – so through the plenary sessions, side-events or workshops, there is going to be dance, art and music, ” says Ivy Josiah, an AOC (Activity Organising Committee) member of the APFF, and an APWLD member from Malaysia. 

Feminist movements in the Global South are outraged by deepening inequalities, climate crises and colonial global finance disproportionately affecting women and marginalised communities against the backdrop of authoritarianism and militarism. 

The APFF aims to serve as a platform for participants to engage in critical conversations and strategies for collective action. By bringing together grassroots activists, the Forum aims to build connections and solidarities among them, and to envision a new roadmap for a feminist world that promotes equality and justice for all, addressing systemic challenges while highlighting stories of resistance and creativity. 

APWLD Regional Coordinator Misun Woo, emphasises the critical role of feminists, activists and movements in bringing change and building a feminist world. 

“At this Forum, we come together as a movement to build not only a feminist analysis, but ways to build a feminist future. This is where our creative energies will spark transformative change. APFF is the space where we nurture and sustain our movements, strengthen our political unity to shut down the oppressive system – imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. Only with that, can we achieve our feminist future that is based on truth, self-determination, freedom and justice,” Misun notes.##

For more information, please visit the APFF website or contact apffcomms@apwld.org.