New Feminist Leadership Web Portal Offers Online Home to All Generations of Activists

Shirkat Gah - Women’s Resource Centre, the Institute for Women’s Empowerment (IWE), and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) have today announced the launch of a new feminist leadership web portal as part of their Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Development for Democratisation (WELDD) programme. The portal will act as a virtual pathway to feminist activists, organisations, and dreamers of a gender -just and egalitarian world. The portal is a space to share useful resources, a forum for sharing experiences and holding discussions and debates about how to nurture feminist leadership that is transformative and sustainable. WELDD is committed to Global South knowledge production, and will hold a space for theoretical/conceptual explorations emerging from Muslim majority contexts in Arabic, Bahasa, English, French and Urdu.

WELDD feminist leadership training participants show their power, Cairo 2013

The WELDD programme is a joint initiative of Shirkat Gah in Pakistan, IWE in Hong Kong, and WLUML. WELDD is building capacity for transformative inter-generational feminist leadership across the world, strengthening the next generation of grassroots activists and learning from them, linking women from some twenty countries including: Egypt, the Gambia, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, and Tunisia. Training workshops, mentorships, and interactions have catalysed cross-border partnerships, and provided a springboard for collaborative actions to promote gender equality and social justice, enhance women’s political participation, build peace, end culturally justified violence against women and strengthen economic rights. The web portal is a place for sharing and engaging reflection.

The web portal is also designed to engage women our workshops and other activities cannot reach – a digital space of solidarity when physical ones prove elusive. Connecting women from diverse locations and cultures, the web portal will amplify lesser-heard voices from the global women’s movement and bring closer the stories of women working in remote places. The web portal aims to help sustain the bonds established through WELDD activities, document and celebrate the success stories of women leaders, and share their strategies for change, but also the questions and challenges of building transformative feminist leadership that can be sustained.

The portal will include a blog section, ‘Public Square’. Public Square will be an informal space to express views, broadcast information on one’s work, to reflect upon current affairs, and to invite responses from others. It will be a place for blogs of any format, including artwork, video, and poetry. Posts are welcome in any of WELDD’s core languages- Arabic, Bahasa, English, French, and Urdu.

For more information, and if you would like to write for Public Square, or if you want to join our community as an editor and/or translator, please email isabel@wluml.org