Resourcing Feminist Futures in Asia: Interrogate, Create Space, and Situate Challenges & Solutions

Day 2 3pm 2 hours Hindi, English, Bangla

Feminist movements in South Asia are doing groundbreaking and critical work, with little to no funding support, and often in conditions that are unprecedented. These groups are from constituencies that are subject to intersecting harms from the state. As governments in the region are increasingly using legal and regulatory systems to restrict and suppress dissent, movements are faced with excessive barriers to access resources for their work. Although these restrictions are not new to movements, they have become much tighter, especially after the Covid 19 pandemic.

This decline of civic space has been manifesting in numerous ways – individuals are facing significant challenges to exercise their democratic rights; the space for discussing, exercising and actualising women’s rights work is diminishing; feminist groups are having to be invisible or near-invisible to protect themselves and their constituencies; the freedoms of association and assembly are slowly being eroded to reveal a political system that is fragile, and human rights defenders are finding themselves more and more vulnerable to a number of injustices.

There is a need for the funding ecosystem to know and hold these opposing realities about the situation in South Asia. There is also a need for South Asian movements to connect, collaborate, conspire and co-strategize on how to strengthen the feminist funding ecosystem in the region through knowledge building and advocacy.

This panel discussion aims 1) to create knowledge and facilitate learning exchange between activists and funders by centering the voices of those most affected and to build a deeper understanding of movements’ priorities and the contexts in which they work. 2) This panel will also offer a space for dialogue between movements and women’s and feminist funds around the roles that they can play in creating a more just resourcing ecosystem in the region.

As part of this panel, we will also be launching a Manifesto of Demands from diverse feminist and women’s rights movements from across South Asia. This manifesto of demands is a work in progress and it is intended to be used as a means to start conversations with other actors in the region for better resourced feminist movements in South Asia.