At CSW69, the call to fund feminist futures resounded louder than ever against the backdrop of economic injustice, fragmented advocacy, and a political declaration that sidestepped the global anti-rights backlash. This reflection emerges not from the plenary halls, but from the spaces where feminist resistance was being strategically mobilized: the sidelines, the courtrooms, and the coalitions demanding more than symbolic gestures.
This year’s 69th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69) was historic not only for commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, but for exposing how the “masters of misogyny”, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it, are gaining strength. The worrying disconnect between political declarations and lived feminist realities was apparent more than ever. Held in March 2025 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the world’s largest conference on women drew over 15,000 participants and more than 1,200 side events. But it was at the margins, not the main plenary where feminist futures were being actively imagined.
One such space was the panel discussion ‘Collective Responsibility for Beijing+30: Ensuring Financing for Feminist Futures’, where I had the opportunity to contribute perspectives from strategic litigation and feminist legal advocacy across Africa. The message was clear: funding feminist futures is not a technical budgeting issue. It is a political demand for resourcing resistance in criminalized, underfunded, and over-surveilled contexts. Despite decades of promises, feminist movements, particularly in the Global South, remain drastically underfunded. This structural underinvestment does not merely limit program delivery, it actively undermines legal challenges to patriarchal and heteronormative systems that keep women and gender-diverse people economically precarious. This underfunding is a profound injustice: women’s economic participation continues to be framed in apolitical terms, stripped of structural analysis and historical context as how the UN Secretary-General put it in his opening speech “the poison of patriarchy is back’’. This is further echoed in the words of General Assembly President, Philémon Yang “we are at a defining moment”, where political urgency and resources needed are not sufficient given the challenges we face. Whether it is unpaid care work, lack of access to land, or discriminatory labor laws, women and marginalized genders face compounded barriers, yet funding rarely flows to those challenging these inequities at their root.
Law as a tool for liberation
This is where strategic litigation becomes an essential tool for advancing feminist social justice, holding state and non-state actors accountable for gender-based rights violations, developing progressive jurisprudence, and reshaping policy and institutional norms. The Women Socio-Economic Rights (WSER) strategy adopts a pan-African feminist approach grounded in substantive equality, intersectionality, and legal mobilization. It addresses the economic challenges women face across multiple spheres, including unequal access to land and property, alimony, reproductive injustice, and the gendered impacts of climate change on agricultural livelihoods. Litigation also targets systemic discrimination in informal and low-paying economies, exploitative labor practices in extractive industries, workplace sexual harassment, and the denial of fair wages and social protections. By engaging in roles such as amicus curiae, a person or organisation not directly involved in a case but offering information or arguments to assist the court, as well as serving as legal advisors or providing direct representation, and by complementing these efforts with extra-legal measures like psychosocial support and advocacy, this approach frames litigation as a feminist political act aimed at challenging structural inequality and transforming the law into a tool for liberation.
System change needs time – and money
The core issue is no longer the recognition of feminist movements’ needs, but whether institutions are prepared to shift power, redistribute resources, and centre local leadership.
Mentionable, the sustainability of these strategic litigation work is deeply anchored in trust-based relationships with donors who understand the long game of systems change. This is especially critical as the world witnesses increasing risks tied to direct government funding exemplified by the current shifts under the new Trump administration and its ripple effects on USAID support which threaten the stability of funding streams for feminist and rights-based advocacy work. Strategic litigation and broader feminist legal interventions depend not just on the availability of resources but because on shared values, autonomy, and the political clarity that comes with donor solidarity, not dependency. This was further reinforced at CSW69, where both panel discussions and bilateral meetings with actors such as the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, BMZ, Medica Mondiale, and feminist funds like Colmena and the Black Feminist Fund emphasized the pressing need for multi-year, activist-led, and community-accountable funding. The core issue is no longer the recognition of feminist movements’ needs, but whether institutions are prepared to shift power, redistribute resources, and centre local leadership.
CSW as a symptom of fragmentation
While CSW69 showcased the breadth of global feminist organizing, it also underscored a troubling fragmentation. Critical discussions on sex workers’ rights, digital disinformation, and gender-based violence unfolded in parallel, yet often in isolation. The absence of coordinated thematic pathways or mechanisms for convergence hindered the kind of strategic cross-pollination essential to movement-building. Feminist advocacy depends on solidarity and intersectionality, yet the current structure of CSW seemed to dilute, rather than strengthen, those connections. Likewise, the Beijing+30 Political Declaration, despite reiterating gender equality commitments, fell short by refusing to name the structural and political forces including anti-rights movements, disinformation campaigns, and the weaponization of law that are actively eroding these gains. During the negotiations, strong lobbying efforts by Argentina, along with support from other conservative states, led to the deletion of references to ‘reproductive rights’ from the final text at the last minute, reflecting a broader strategy to roll back previously agreed standards. This underscores how well-organized, coordinated, and strategic right-wing and authoritarian member states have become in multilateral negotiations, deliberately working to weaken the normative framework for human rights and gender equality.
This silence is not benign; it is a political omission that threatens the very justice we seek. Feminist liberation cannot be negotiated through diplomacy that sanitizes dissent.
From panel discussions to protest lines, courtrooms to coalition spaces, the call to fund feminist futures is not symbolic, it is a demand born from the urgency of survival, justice, and dignity. Building truly feminist futures requires legal and economic transformation. For feminists from the Global South and Small Island Developing States such as Mauritius, participation at CSW69 carried both privilege and weight. It was an opportunity to elevate lived realities, foster transnational solidarity, and push beyond performative commitments. Visibility in global arenas must translate into tangible, sustained support at home. Funding for Feminist Futures is not merely a theme, it is a rallying cry for redistribution over charity, for law as a vehicle of liberation, and for recognizing that feminist movements are not waiting for the future, they are already creating it, the world needs to catch up.
