Women’s movements in the Brazilian Northeast are plural, creative and persistent. They are diverse struggles, since there are different ways of organizing to deal with the volume of denunciations and with proposals to defend the right to a life without violence and also demand a fair division of power and resources to transform painful realities.
Inspired by this context, on 29 June, CESE launched the publication “Our struggles, our ways of fighting: experiences of Northeast women’s organizations in the defence of rights and democracy,” in the wake of research and interviews from 2021 and 2022 with women from these organizations. The text takes a closer look at this work, highlighting potential but also showing gaps and weaknesses.
Click here to download the book! (in Portuguese)
The publication includes a mapping of 61 organizations and experiences, that work along three central strands of the Giving for Change Programme, an initiative supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The 5-year programme aims for the transformation of development relations, supporting the adoption of more equitable practices, focussing on 8 countries in the global south. At CESE, the focus is on collective learning between organizations in the women’s movements of the Northeast, particularly in a Community of Practice, today comprised of 18 organizations.
The text provides a summary profile of the organizations, including their distribution across states, time span, areas of action, coverage and connections to social movements. The mapping then includes specific elements based on three strands of work in the Giving for Change Programme: mobilizing support, fund-raising and communications.
Finally, work experiences are presented in line with these three strands, recording strategies, achievements and lessons learnt based on concrete action in the struggle for rights, demonstrating the vitality of the field of women’s organizations in the Northeast.
The material was based on research and interviews conducted by Mônica Oliveira, from the Black Coalition for Rights (Coalizão Negra por Direitos) and the Black Women’s Network of Pernambuco (Rede de Mulheres Negras de Pernambuco), and on the willingness of a number of organizations to tell their stories, involving a range of women’s movements from the countryside, the city, the waters and the forests.
It is worth noting that the majority of this material was prepared against a backdrop of the pandemic, negationism, the aggravation of human rights violations and attacks on democracy – a period of significant challenges when attempting to mobilize society.
Viviane Hermida, CESE Projects and Training Advisor and Programme Coordinator, noted that, in the year CESE celebrates 50 years supporting grassroots movements, the expectation is that the experiences narrated and the data presented in the publication will not only serve to reinforce exchanges and improve practices between the organizations involved in the Giving for Change programme, but also to inspire other organizations.
“We also hope that it will serve as a further warning to society, cooperation agencies and other institutions of the need for ongoing support for women’s organizations, in particular in the Northeast region, to enable their projects to have impact and sustainability” she declared.
Click here to download the book! (in Portuguese)
Graphic design of the publication by Coletivo Trama and illustrations by Angola Comunicação and Coletivo Trama.