"Women are at the forefront of every change." - Tawakkol Karman
Change is driven from the ground up and women’s movements provide the spark for change. The Nobel Peace laureates champion women, working across movements, to strengthen our collective power to bring about change.
We support women's movements on many fronts:
- improving policies for women's human rights
- campaigning to ban lethal autonomous weapons
- advocating for millions of dollars in new funding for women's human rights
- leveraging financial resources for grassroots women's organizations through advocacy
Photo: Launch of Korea Peace Now! campaign in Washington, D.C. 2019
Highlights of our work:
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We delivered advocacy and media workshops in Syria and Yemen to women peace activists. The Yemeni women created the Women4Yemen coalition which is now active on social media. The coalition has presented to a number of global events and is influencing official peace channels. Women4Yemen has also been invited to participate in other forums press for women’s inclusion in the peace process.
- As a result of our work with Syrian women, the Syrian Women’s Political Movement invited us to work with them to help get the word out about their first policy papers.
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Working in a consortium to increase our influence and our collective capacity in 2019, Nobel Women’s Initiative co-founded—with four other feminist peace organizations—an ongoing global peace effort on the Korean peninsula – Korea Peace Now! Women Mobilizing to End the War – to call for lasting peace in the Korean Peninsula. The campaign has connected with key United States Democratic Party presidential candidates, President Moon of South Korea, and with North Korean officials. It also received high-profile media coverage (Time, Newsweek and CNN) in its first year of existence. Significantly, in July 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives approved an amendment by Rep. Ro Khanna declaring that diplomacy is essential with North Korea and calling for an end to the Korean War. In October 2019, the campaign launched a report, The Human Costs of Gendered Impacts of Sanctions on North Korea, showing adverse consequences for civilians, especially women. The report has been promoted extensively. Decision makers are being influenced, including UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea, Tomás Ojea Quintana, who directly quoted from the report in his calls for a review of sanctions and their detrimental impact on the human rights situation in the country.
- We are active members of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and we work in coalition with other organizations including Mines Action Canada and the Women Peace and Security Network-Canada to amplify the voices of women peacebuilders working for a world free of killer robots. In 2019, as part of our 16 days of Activism Campaign, we profiled campaign member Liz O’Sullivan with great success. Her written profile was one of our most popular, with high reach and engagement across our platforms.
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Our advocacy and communications efforts, in partnership with the MATCH International Women’s Fund (now the Equality Fund), laid critical groundwork for the significant and path-breaking progress towards commitments by the Government of Canada for new funding for women’s rights organizations and movements. This includes a commitment for $300M for women’s rights organizations through the Equality Fund, announced at Women Deliver in June 2019. Much of our advocacy with the Government of Canada focused on the importance of women’s rights organizations being contracted as ‘implementing partners’.
- We were instrumental, through advocacy efforts, in grants being awarded (valued at $4.5M) to grassroots women’s organizations though other funding mechanisms (Global Affairs Canada Peace and Stabilization Operations Program, MATCH International Women’s Fund, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Assistance) including critical funding for the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, recognized by the Norwegian Agency for Development Assistance.