Engaging in Policy Advocacy
WIMN believes that real movement towards rights will only happen through organizing and movement-building. Thus, we create space and support leadership development for grassroots migrant women’s organizations to impact policy, while strengthening cross-sectoral feminist movement-building.
This work goes hand-in-hand. We build movement to urge decision-makers to take the necessary action. These are critical elements for addressing the organizing and movement-building challenges that we face – the huge setbacks to rights and democracy as well as the challenges to feminist practice within migration civil society.
This is an urgent moment for women in migration, who are systematically denied rights and exploited, yet who are often invisible. We also see how our years of work towards shaping a new global migration architecture from a women’s human rights perspective is undermined today by intensified enforcement and the demonization of migrants. These attacks on migrants–and on “gender ideology,” Black history and lived realities, Trans’ rights and the reality of climate change–all converge in a hostile political discourse and an environment that threatens feminist futures and democracy.
WIMN builds movement from the grassroots to impact policy-makers at all levels at the nexus of gender and migration.
WIMN has played a key role within civil society in helping to shape the new global architecture on global migration, especially within and around UN spaces. WIMN successfully insisted on a cross-cutting gender lens in policy debates leading to the approval of the UN’s Global Compact for Migration in 2018, and with Oxfam International spearheaded the widely-endorsed Marrakech Women’s Rights Manifesto at the launch of the Global Compact.
Examples of our work in policy advocacy:
- WIMN is a member of UN Women’s Expert Working Group for Addressing Women’s Human Rights in the Global Compact for Migration and the UN Network on Migration’s Gender Workstream.
- WIMN regularly participates in the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women, convening parallel events and a migrant women’s caucus.
- WIMN had a strong presence at the first UN International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) in May 2022 and played a major role in preparing the Global Coalition on Migration’s Spotlight Report, formulating a policy agenda for the IMRF.
- Active in international feminist movements, WIMN is a member of AWID; the Women’s Major Group; the Feminist Allies Constituency at the UN; Feminists4People’s Vaccine and the Gender & Trade Coalition.
- WIMN collaborated with DAWN on a 2022 webinar focused on migrant women in the context of the COVID pandemic and was part of a 2021-2022 Bosch Foundation Cohort on Reducing Inequalities through Intersectional Practice which addressed feminist intersectional organizing.
- At CSW67 in 2023, WIMN members engaged in conversations about how the digital economy impacts women and trans women workers. CSW 67 parallel event organized by GAATW, Women, Work, Migration and Technology
- WIMN statement to UN Network on Migration Annual Meeting
- Global Coalition on Migration Spotlight Report
Our Throughlines
While multiple factors drive migration and impact migrants, WIMN has focused on three priority throughlines in our organizing and advocacy: Climate Change, Labor Rights, and Regularization. Here are some examples of how our work Engaging In Policy Advocacy intersects with and impacts these throughlines.
This is a work in progress — please check back soon!
