In countries rich and poor, authoritarian leaders are flexing their muscles by curtailing women’s rights. We must trust—and invest in—our frontline feminist fighters.
As we enter 2025 at what seems to be a heyday of impunity for human rights abuses worldwide, autocratic leaders worldwide are taking note. In countries rich and poor, these leaders are flexing their muscles by curtailing our rights—to speak our minds, control our bodies, vote our consciences and have access to fundamental things as safe shelter, clean water and affordable nutrition, education and healthcare.
At WomenStrong International, our partners across the globe are seeing this ramp-up of restrictions up close.
In Afghanistan this January, the Taliban upped the ante on their 80 repressive measures targeting girls’ and women’s rights by banning them from attending any medical training institution. Two years ago, the Taliban banned Afghan women from attending university and from working for domestic and international non-governmental agencies, strangling aid workers’ ability to identify and support families in need and contributing to the nation’s sky-high maternal mortality rate, already one of the highest in the world.
In August 2024, as part of the Taliban’s Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the group issued a new religious code that prohibits women from praying out loud, showing their faces and looking at a man to whom they’re not related.
Schooling beyond sixth grade was banned when the Taliban took over in 2021, but enforcement, particularly in urban areas, has now been geared up. For our partner Sahar Education, which, through intrepidness, ingenuity, dedication and sheer moxy, somehow manages to continue to educate girls in ways I won’t divulge here, the threat to their programming and to the safety of their staff and participants is frighteningly real.
These bold, local, women-led organizations know best how to build effective coalitions, how to handle delicate negotiations, and how to resist, when necessary.
Also in Asia, the work of WomenStrong’s partners Society for Labour and Development in India and Gender and Development for Cambodia have been threatened with the dramatic shrinkage of democratic space and human rights. India’s repressive Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the second generation of the Hun Sen regime in Cambodia, now under the leadership of his military general son Hun Manet, brutally target press freedoms, free speech, labor rights and environmental activism.
Shifting our gaze southward to the sub-Saharan region, WomenStrong’s Kenya partner, The Action Foundation, which works with girls and women living with disabilities in the slums of Nairobi, now has to deal with rampant, longstanding discrimination against those living with disabilities, alongside a recent epidemic of femicide that has roiled civil society nationwide.
In Uganda, the government’s fierce crackdowns on environmental and land rights activists, and religious freedoms are of deep concern to our WomenStrong partners there, Girl Up Initiative Uganda and Action for Development Uganda, who work on girls’ and women’s rights and education, livelihood, empowerment and on the intersections of gender and climate justice. Malawi and Zambia, too, have seen new discriminatory laws targeting LGBTQ+ citizens, making it hard for WomenStrong’s partners there—Girls Empowerment Network and Copper Rose Zambia—to meet the needs of all their program participants without putting their staff, their funding, and their very existence as non-governmental organizations at risk.
Yet, women’s rights groups are not cowed. Despite the risks, every WomenStrong partner mentioned here has persisted, by finding surreptitious workarounds or by fighting back, like the Action Foundation’s women with disabilities and their male champions who eagerly joined Kenya’s nationwide anti-femicide protests.
Other partners have found remarkable ways of continuing their work. Despite the pervasive, horrific violence perpetuated against women and girls in Guatemala, our partner Women’s Justice Initiative has successfully used Guatemala’s now-powerful laws criminalizing femicide, sexual violence, exploitation, trafficking and other forms of gender discrimination to successfully prosecute crimes perpetrated on girls and women in highly vulnerable Mayan communities.
In El Salvador, WomenStrong partner Mujeres Transformando has collaborated with local government to train public officials on labor and human rights protections, despite the widespread violations of human rights under President Nayib Bukele.
And WomenStrong partner Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity, having fought and sacrificed in the fierce, long struggle to oust the corrupt and oppressive ruler PM Sheikh Hasina, is now working overtime to persuade the new caretaker government to raise the minimum wage and protect human and workers’ rights.
We need to ask them what they need in order to continue their life-changing programming and advocacy.
These bold, local, women-led organizations know best how to build effective coalitions, how to handle delicate negotiations, and how to resist, when necessary. Nevertheless, major bilateral funders, corporations and philanthropies, worried about working with authoritarian regimes, are pulling up stakes, leaving women-led nonprofits without resources or the legal or diplomatic support they need in order to hold their ground.
In 2025 and most likely beyond, it’s going to be up to women’s rights champions—that is, all of us!—to step in and support these intrepid local NGOs who are best-positioned to know what the women and girls in their communities need. We need to ask them what they need in order to continue their life-changing programming and advocacy. We need to trust and heed their responses. We must then help them get what they need so that girls, women, LGBTQ+ communities and other marginalized populations receive the support they need in order to thrive, now and over the years to come.
When women’s rights and all of our rights are under serious threat, and women on the front lines are risking their personal safety, health and their organizations’ very viability in order to protect our collective global goal of universal rights, it’s the least we can do.
