The Women’s Rights Programme (WRP) is a programme of APC, a global membership-based network of organisations and activists founded in 1990 and working at the intersection of digital rights, human rights, gender and the environment. The WRP’s work is situated within diverse feminist, women’s, LGBTQIA+, sexual rights and digital rights movements, and is conducted in collaboration with partners from these movements to influence the usage, development and decision-making related to digital technologies.
Between March and September 2024, the WRP embarked on a journey of consultation and reflection that required becoming present to the current moment, both within and of our context. This journey prompted us to recalibrate our ways of being and doing together, to refine our articulation of what truly matters in our work, and adapt our approach to practicing feminist technology in community with others.
What resulted from this process was a strategic framework for our collective work over the next strategic period of 2025-2028 that is dynamic, perpetually responsive to our needs and the needs of our partners, and creates spaciousness for our curiosities, collective analysis and sensemaking across contexts to lead our actions within the cadence of a cyclical and reciprocal practice of co-creating together, in relationship with each other as a team, cross-programmatically within APC, and with our partners and communities of practice.
Access the APC WRP Strategic Plan 2025 - 2028 here.
History of the WRP
Critical to this journey was an examination of our history, to uncover the patterns of how we as a collective have previously related to our contexts. These patterns are what produced the positive contributions and impact the WRP has made to the field of feminist technology, and we wanted to uncover these and integrate them deliberately into our ways of working going forward.
The WRP was born out of the Women’s Networking Support Programme (WNSP), a global, women’s internet-based network of APC members that began in the early 1990’s. The WNSP sought to build and strengthen a network of diverse women working in different technology and women’s rights fields, at local, regional and international levels. From its inception, the strengths of the WNSP in its approach to network building included ensuring a diverse membership, taking time to build trust and relationships through slow, solid and sustainable processes, and being women-led.
The online tool enabled programmes and projects using information and communication technologies (ICTs) across diverse sectors of social change to integrate a gender analysis into the evaluations of their work.
A formative moment for the WNSP was their participation at the 4th UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where they created a 40-women computing centre to build electronic newsgroups across thematic areas as a means for the women present at the conference to connect with the rest of the world. WNSP was integrated into APC in the early 2000s. The first tool developed by the WNSP after this integration was the Gender Evaluation Methodology for Internet and ICTs (GEM). The online tool enabled programmes and projects using information and communication technologies (ICTs) across diverse sectors of social change to integrate a gender analysis into the evaluations of their work. GEM was developed in consultation with thirty community-based organisations in the global South and had widespread impact on national-level policy and technology development.
In the same year that GEM was published, APC commissioned research on the intersection of violence against women (VAW) and technology – a first inquiry of its kind. One section of the study outlined some of the ways feminists have started to reclaim digital technologies as part of their own living histories, concluding that this reclaiming is the only way forward in the face of increasing violence online. This section was titled, ‘Take Back The Tech.’
It was not long until Take Back The Tech! launched as a campaign by a small group of feminist activists, initially from the Asia region, which grew into Latin America and Africa and became increasingly global over time. TBTT! aimed to be a meeting place of different feminist actors who wanted to make sense of how technology was affecting their lives. They were deliberate about calling what was happening ‘violence,’ but also actively resisted the victim-orientated narratives perpetuated by women’s rights groups at the time, by centring their inquiry around claiming agency, having fun with technology, increasing autonomy, self-expression, and building community online.
TBTT! was an ongoing campaign that had two major multi-year projects from 2009-2014 involving documenting and analysing online VAW across multiple countries. These projects were, “Strengthening Women’s Strategic Use of Information and Communication Technologies to Combat Violence Against Women and Girls” (2009-2011) and “End Violence: Women’s Rights and Safety Online” (2012-2014). At the time, the notion that online gender-based violence (OGBV) was even real was strongly disputed in women’s rights and digital rights movements alike. As one WRP ally shared, “TBTT! was so important in the feminist movement in understanding online violence, particularly from the Majority World.”
TBTT! galvanised the WRP and its many collaborators around understanding and building evidence of OGBV through mapping, research and countless conversations across their network. The statistics and qualitative evidence brought about by these efforts proved to be the foundation of the deepening and expansion of the WRP’s advocacy. The WRP was able to make key gains in the development of international policy that gave language and recognition for the first time to VAW online.
TBTT! galvanised the WRP and its many collaborators around understanding and building evidence of OGBV through mapping, research and countless conversations across their network.
Contributing to the WRP’s sensemaking of the policy landscape was GenderIT, one of the first websites looking at ICT policy through a gender lens. Initially launched in 2006 as a platform monitoring policy developments, GenderIT today is a think tank of and for women’s rights, sexuality, sexual rights and internet rights activists, academics, journalists and advocates from the Majority World. The website continues to be a crucial and unique resource for movement and policy actors working at and curious about the intersection of gender and technology. One WRP ally expressed that, “what it provides is critical and precious… it is the only resource I can consistently site.”
In 2008, the WRP launched the first Feminist Tech eXchange (FTX) at the 2008 AWID Forum. The FTX was a feminist response to the need for women- and queer-led approaches and strategies for capacity building about technology, grounded in Majority World feminist expertise and praxis, in a digital rights sector dominated by white men from the global North. The FTX recognises the “undervaluing of women who are doing these roles… an undervaluing of that labour, [of] tech capacity building in movements,” one WRP ally explained.
Since its inception, the FTX has developed and published feminist training curriculum for trainers, and continues to create space for women and queer folks to come together at national and transnational levels to contextualise technology, play with technology, break it, open it up, build it and reshape it, as integral practices of a feminist methodology aimed at dismantling patriarchal power. One WRP partner shared their experience of attending an FTX event, saying, it brought “together implementing partners from diverse locations to share knowledge, [and] develop adaptable feminist tools and frameworks for local contexts, which support us to enhance the impact for our campaigning, movement building, and advocacy.”
The recently published podcast articulates memories and experiences of over 15 feminist tech activists from the global south who were involved in imagining and creating a feminist internet, all connected by a common thread: making a feminist internet!
It was 2013 when the WRP got their first mention of ICTs in a global policy document about VAW through the visibility and traction that technology-related VAW was gaining. The WRP embarked on a trajectory of achieving recognition of OGBV in two further international policy in 2014 and 2017. In 2018, the WRP claimed a milestone victory, which was the Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution entitled, ‘Accelerating efforts to eliminate violence against women and girls: preventing and responding to violence against women and girls in digital contexts.’
In 2014, the WRP brought 50 activists and advocates working in sexual rights, women’s rights, violence against women, and internet rights to Malaysia for the first ‘Imagine a Feminist Internet’ meeting. The outcome was the very first articulation of Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPIs), a feminist framing and response to the internet emerging from women and queer persons in the Majority World. A second version was published in 2016, as 17 principles organised into five clusters. Today, the FPIs continue to be expanded upon, and provide a framework for feminist movements and anyone wanting to articulate and explore technology through a feminist lens.
[GenderIT] continues to be a crucial and unique resource for movement and policy actors working at and curious about the intersection of gender and technology. One WRP ally expressed that, “what it provides is critical and precious… it is the only resource I can consistently site.”
As a means of supporting the WRP network’s policy advocacy related to the internet, and riding the crest of the WRP’s strong policy advocacy gains at the international level, the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) was established in 2018. FIRN has continued since its inception to undertake data-driven research in relation to OGBV, economy and labour, access, datafication, and other themes affecting women, gender-diverse and queer people, building on the vocabulary of the FPIs, to provide substantial evidence for driving change in policy and law. FIRN’s research continues to be used widely by both APC as an organisation, as well as its network, partners and allies. One WRP partner noted, “WRP's efforts toward producing intersectional research relevant to current concerns of digital justice and feminist and sexual rights movements aided us in conducting research on the online violence and hate against Muslim minorities in India.”
Today, FIRN, along with GenderIT, provide platforms for critical voices from the Majority World to articulate and emphasise the needs of women, gender-diverse and queer people for internet policy discussions and decision-making.
The WRP has, since its inception, played a pivotal role in bringing gender to the centre of conversations about technology, and bringing technology into conversations about gender. Overtime, the WRP has also been at the forefront of shifting the narrative of this intersection, as one WRP ally explained, “from women’s participation in ICTs, to gender and technology, to feminism and technology, to feminist technology.” Another WRP ally shared her experience of this history, saying, “APC is literally the grandmother of feminist tech. If I had to think about which network pioneered for me the work around feminist tech and the visibilisation of women from the global Majority World in those spaces… APC led that imagination for me.”
Moreover, the WRP has not only spearheaded, but also mainstreamed, the notion of online gender-based violence as a lived experience, despite widespread resistance from other actors, including from women’s movements at the time, that OGBV was real. The WRP continues to be at the forefront of deepening and expanding an articulation of OGBV in relation to current changes in technology, as well as of a feminist internet that enables agency and liberation of women, queer, gender-diverse and non-binary people.
This history also shows a consistent pattern of method to the WRP’s work, a cycle of research and action. What emerged from research directed the next steps of the WRP’s path: The 2005 study of the intersection of VAW and technology inspired the TBTT! campaign in 2006. The research undertaken in TBTT!’s multi-country projects on VAW and technology provided critical evidence that enabled the WRP’s policy advocacy gains in the 2010s. The collective inquiries into a feminist internet through the Imagine a Feminist Internet convenings have created a framework of analysis that continues to be applied in FIRN, as well as the convenings hosted by the WRP such as Making a Feminist Internet, FTX and the Gender and Internet Governance eXchange (GIGX). Today, the research and thought leadership published in FIRN and on GenderIT remain the backbone of the WRP’s policy advocacy agendas delivered in international policy spaces.
FIRN’s research continues to be used widely by both APC as an organisation, as well as its network, partners and allies. One WRP partner noted, “WRP's efforts toward producing intersectional research relevant to current concerns of digital justice and feminist and sexual rights movements aided us in conducting research on the online violence and hate against Muslim minorities in India."
The WRP today
The WRP continues to undertake impactful work. Within the current moment of the WRP, this work is carried out through the vehicles of FTX, FIRN, TBTT, the FPIs, and policy advocacy. Developments in the funding sector in the last decade have also affected the organising landscape of INGOs, who are increasingly coming together through the arrangement of consortia. APC has accompanied this change, and WRP is currently actively involved in two Dutch-funded consortia, namely, Our Voices Our Futures (OVOF) and Safety for Voices (SfV).
The WRP also engages with other programmes within APC. In the past, the WRP has actively partnered with the LocNet Initiative for their mentorship programme and in projects building feminist technological infrastructure. The WRP also consistently engages APC’s Social and Environmental Justice Programme (SEJ) on policy advocacy-related initiatives. The WRP upholds an intention to deepen its cross-programme work in the 2025-2028 strategic period for the purposes of realising APC’s mission to strengthen collective organising among members, partners and allies working across the organisation’s various spaces of impact.
APC’s mission within its current strategic plan (2024-2027) is “to strengthen collective organising towards building a transformative movement to ensure that the internet and digital technologies enable social, gender and environmental justice for all people.”
"APC is literally the grandmother of feminist tech. If I had to think about which network pioneered for me the work around feminist tech and the visibilisation of women from the global Majority World in those spaces… APC led that imagination for me.”
The WRP contributes to this mission and APC’s broader Theory of Change in three key ways:
- Cross-programme collaboration, strengthening the intersectional feminist analysis and praxis with which other APC programmes make sense of and engage the contexts of the organisation’s broader network and partners
- Strongly rooting our work within APC’s network- and movement-building strategies
- Co-creating, alongside other APC staff and APC management, an organisational container that creates space for critical analysis of APC’s positionality within the contexts in which it works, for reflection on our capacity as an organisation to carry out our work with care and political coherence, and to engage in organisational practices of mutual accountability and support
The WRP’s Strategic Plan 2025-2028
The WRP’s Strategic Plan was developed by the APC WRP, with support from Christy Alves Nascimento and the Moon Tide Collective. Christy is a South African feminist organiser, thinker and strategist who supports justice-driven organisations in living out their purpose courageously. She manages the Moon Tide Collective, a fluid ecosystem of feminist practitioners bringing expertise and imagination from the global South to collaborations addressing the complexities of our times.
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