Reclaiming Technology and Innovation to Support Feminist Organizing Globally

Global Fund for Women’s grantee partners are relying on digital tools for their movement-building work more than ever before. Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, they’ve launched apps to address gender-based violence, created spaces for online convening, and built safe and inclusive digital networks and communities.  

These feminist technology tools and infrastructures are critical to sustaining movements and communities as they work toward de-colonialization, anti-oppression, justice, and liberation. But feminist groups are facing unprecedented levels of online harassment, cyber-attacks, digital surveillance, and censorship as they organize and advocate online. This harassment aims to silence feminists’ heightened resistance and calls for democracy and human rights. Simultaneously there are very few resources going to locally-led movements centering women, girls, and all historically marginalized people that are creating and using technology.   

We are thrilled to be on the Generation Equality Forum Action Coalition on Technology and Innovation to help fill these gaps and rectify these harms. The Technology and Innovation Action Coalition is mobilizing partnerships, funding, and resources toward the following goals by 2026:  

• Reduce by half the gender digital divide across generations by accelerating meaningful access to digital technologies and universal digital literacy 
• Increase investments toward feminist technology and innovation by 50% to support women’s leadership as innovators and better respond to women and girls’ most pressing needs 
• Double the proportion of women working in technology and innovation by setting up new networks and benchmarks to transform innovation ecosystems 
• A majority of countries and tech companies demonstrate accountability by implementing policies and solutions against online and tech-facilitated gender-based violence and discrimination 

To learn more about the Generation Equality Draft Actions, click here.

We ask other funders including donors, corporations, and private philanthropy to join us in making financial commitments to groups that are creating and using technology to advance gender justice, intersectionality, and accessibility and inclusivity. We know that how we resource these Action Coalition priorities matters. We call on all participants to commit 50% of all funding pledges to fund autonomous, women-, girls-, and trans-led feminist organizations and movements.

As part of our commitment to the Generation Equality Forum, Global Fund for Women is partnering with Numun Fund, the first dedicated fund for feminist technology led from the Global South. Numun Fund aims to seed a growing ecosystem of feminist engagement with technology to ensure the resilience, agency, and the transformative power of movements. The partnership includes:

• An initial unrestricted investment by Global Fund for Women that is aimed at strengthening Numun Fund’s institutional capacity to serve as a resource mobilizer and grant-maker for feminist technology, prioritizing feminist technology movements in the Global South
• Convening and strengthening a global community of feminist tech innovators, activists, and practitioners and supporting advocacy on gender justice and technology policies through collaboration

Together with feminist activists globally, Global Fund for Women is demanding transparency and accountability from governments and the technology industry. We are working together to disrupt, re-envision, and reclaim technology and innovation toward gender justice. We hope the Action Coalition will help us all respond more effectively to the challenges and opportunities that the internet and other technologies bring to feminist organizing around the world and to better resource movements for equality, justice, and liberation.