After more than a decade of growth and impact, WEI is turning some of our attention inward to strengthen our organizational resilience. A coveted BUILD grant from the Ford Foundation is enabling us to plan for the long term and take critical steps to ensure our future as a leader of the global disabled feminist movement.

Like many organizations working to advance equality and social justice, in our first decade, WEI concentrated our energies and resources on establishing and expanding our programs. – which makes sense; this is our core mission work. Yet we also know that to sustain this work over time – however long it takes to accomplish our mission – we need to fortify our foundation.

WEI is fortunate to be one of a select group of gender equality organizations to be awarded a Ford Foundation BUILD grant. The BUILD Initiative (Building Institutions and Networks) is aimed at making social justice organizations stronger and more resilient.

In the first year of this 5-year grant, WEI reflected on our growth and progress to date, consulted with our stakeholders about goals and priorities, and developed a new strategic plan. The plan provides a platform for our work that we hope will galvanize our community with a sense of collective purpose and lays out clear steps we can take together to move the dial on gender and disability justice. We’ll be sharing more details of the plan as it gets underway this year.

As a BUILD grantee, WEI also benefits from the solidarity of a cohort of gender justice organizations, with whom we participate in skill-building and information-sharing spaces. These connections strengthen our respective capacity and also form alliances within the movement that will foster further collaboration and amplify our collective impact.

“WEI is the first gender and disability rights organization to receive a Ford BUILD grant, a testament to their leadership, effectiveness, and potential to advance equality and social justice into the future.” – Monica Aleman, International Program Director, Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice, Ford Foundation

Nothing is more powerful than advocates raising their own voices and sharing the realities of their lived experiences to hold leaders accountable for upholding human rights. WEI deploys our substantive and logistical experience with international human rights advocacy to support our partners’ travel to and engagement with human rights bodies in Geneva.

UN treaty bodies and special procedures are valuable tools for advocacy at both international and national levels. WEI aims to engage with these accountability mechanisms in a way that enables not just advocacy but also movement building and cross movement solidarities.

In recent months, that has included WEI working side-by-side with our activist partners to effectively advocate with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Between June to September 2023, Malawi was reviewed by both the CRPD and CEDAW, the Philippines was reviewed by CEDAW, and the United States of America was reviewed by the ICCPR. WEI supported activists from each of these countries to draft and submit shadow reports, advocate with Committee members to ensure an intersectional lens to the concluding observations and develop a national level advocacy strategy aimed at the implementation of resulting recommendations at the country level.

The process of country reviews by treaty bodies are valuable tools to support women and gender-diverse people with disabilities to collaboratively develop an advocacy agenda which is then further strengthened by concluding observations. With the CRPD Committee, WEI worked with our longtime partners at Disabled Women in Africa (DIWA) to ensure a gendered lens to the concluding observation. Our efforts resulted in a nuanced and extensive recognition of the specific challenges of women with disabilities through the concluding observation.

With the CEDAW Committee, WEI, NOVEL (the Philippines) and DIWA (Malawi) focused our advocacy on ensuring women with disabilities are addressed beyond the aggregated ‘marginalised women’. This advocacy resulted in concluding observations addressing specific accessibly concerns of women with disabilities. It is also valuable to note that with support from WEI and Disability Rights Fund, the 86th Session of CEDAW saw one of the largest contingents of women with disabilities from Malawi.

In addition to the country reviews, WEI, DIWA and the Inclusive Generation Equality Collective (IGEC) also had the opportunity for a private briefing with the CEDAW Committee. The briefing introduced the concept of accessibility as fundamental to the realization of the right to access; including access to services, justice, education, political participation and/or employment. It led to a vibrant exchange of ideas between the panelists and the Committee members on what it could look like to apply a disability lens to their observations and recommendations. This was the first of the series of briefings being planned by WEI and IGEC on gender and disability.

View all submissions and concluding observations here:

• MALAWI: CRPD SUBMISSION; CEDAW SUBMISSION; CRPD CONCLUDING OBSERVATION; CEDAW CONCLUDING OBSERVATION
• PHILIPPINES: CEDAW SUBMISSION; CEDAW CONCLUDING OBSERVATION
• USA: HRC SUBMISSION; HRC CONCLUDING OBSERVATION

Abortion bans in the U.S. have devastating consequences- especially for women and gender-diverse people with disabilities. Amanda Spriggs Reid, WEI’s Equal Justice Works Fellow Sponsored by Anonymous led the effort to bring our perspective to litigation in the Zurawski v. State of Texas case.

WEI recently contributed an amicus brief to bring a disability lens to the pivotal Zurawski v. State of Texas abortion rights case.

The case was brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of the growing list of plaintiffs – Texas women who were denied abortion care under the Texas abortion bans, and as a result, faced serious risks to their lives, health, and future fertility – as well as Texas OB-GYNs battling uncertainty that hinders them from providing crucial care.

The case challenges three Texas abortion bans which have resulted in devastating consequences for people in Texas who experience pregnancy complications that threaten their health and/or lives. This is particularly true for women and gender-diverse people with disabilities.

Our brief focuses on the disproportionate harm that people with disabilities face without access to medically necessary abortion care. It underscores the importance of protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities and ensuring equal access to reproductive healthcare.

In partnership with Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), along with eight other organizations and legal academics who signed on in support of the brief, this amicus brief urges the Texas Supreme Court to consider the unique circumstances faced by our community and to interpret the medical exception to the abortion ban in a manner that upholds our rights and safeguards our well-being.

On November 28, 2023, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the case but have yet to release an opinion in Zurawski. However, in the following week, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed suit seeking an emergency abortion on behalf of Kate Cox, a Texas woman with a life-threatening pregnancy. The Texas Supreme Court chose to deny Ms. Cox medical care by claiming that her condition was not yet serious enough to meet the Texas bans’ medical exception, forcing her to seek out-of-state abortion care.

These Texas cases show that “exceptions” to abortion bans do not work and only result in the denial of bodily autonomy and life-saving healthcare.

Picture this: info-packed sessions and hands-on learning of sexual and reproductive health rights, designed for and by people with disabilities. WEI is supporting organizations of people with disabilities (OPDs) in building the capacity they seek with a new curriculum that addresses crucial human rights topics. The goal: Empower OPDs to lead the conversations in their communities about sexual and reproductive health and violence and, in turn, teach future trainings in their own communities.

WEI and the United National Population Fund (UNFPA) recently joined forces to release a brand-new, interactive curriculum on sexual and reproductive health and rights and the right to be free from gender-based violence.

The curriculum offers foundational training for organizations of people with disabilities (OPDs) by providing a resource for people with disabilities to understand and become champions of accessible and inclusive sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender‑based violence services. In two formats – both virtual and in person delivery options – it provides information and experiential learning to deepen expertise on these key human rights topics and support further engagement within the OPD community and beyond.

The need for this resource grew from the success of WEI and UNFPA’s ‘Women and Young Persons with Disabilities: Guidelines for Providing Rights-Based and Gender-Responsive Services to Address Gender-Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights.’ These Guidelines were hugely successful in sharing the key issues and information needed by women, young people, and gender-diverse people with disabilities to service providers and other key stakeholders.

After presenting the Guidelines to stakeholders, including OPDs, around the globe it became clear that our community, women and gender-diverse people with disabilities around the world, wanted more information and training on sexual and reproductive health and rights and the right to be free from violence to support their leadership in ensuring services in their communities were both rights-based and gender-responsive.

In response to this demand, the curriculums were developed to empower facilitators with disabilities to develop a comprehensive understanding of their rights and what it takes to create inclusive sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence services in their communities. Designed as a ‘Train-the-Trainer’ Model, the curriculum also equips people who attend the trainings to become master trainers who then share the knowledge more broadly with their communities.

The curriculum launch took place on November 30th to coincide with International Day of Persons with Disabilities and to raise awareness of barriers related to accessibility, stigma, and attitudes that impact our communities relating to sexual and reproductive health and rights and freedom from violence. WEI and partners from UNFPA discussed the importance of this resource with panelists from Youren Foundation, One-Plus-One Disability Group, and Young People With Disabilities Network, Botswana. Rowena Koloi, Chairperson of the Young People With Disabilities Network, Botswana concluded with, “this curriculum allows young people to own it and take it to their peers, ensuring that they have the knowledge they need in order to provide services that are disability inclusive and nonjudgmental.”

Please find a link to the curriculum resources below:

“Our Bodies, Our Rights! Addressing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and Gender-Based Violence for Women and Young Persons with Disabilities In-Person Curriculum”

“Our Bodies, Our Rights! Addressing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and Gender-Based Violence for Women and Young Persons with Disabilities Virtual Curriculum”

With each New Year, we rededicate ourselves to advancing human rights at the intersection of gender and disability and working towards a more just and equitable future for all.

2023 was a year of transformation at WEI, as our staff, Board, and partners came together in a strategic planning process to define how we want to evolve and what change we want to see in the world. We proudly embark on 2024 with an updated mission and vision a grounding set of values and theory of change, clear and compelling priorities, and measurable outcomes. We are excited to move forward with intention and to share more details with you in the coming months about our bold 5-year plan.

What hasn’t changed – and in fact has only deepened – is our commitment throughout our work to center the voices and the leadership of women and gender-diverse people with disabilities.

You’ll see this as you read about how we’re training facilitators with disabilities to equip for women and young persons with disabilities to advocate for their essential rights, how we are bringing an intersection gender and disability lens to challenge the rollback of abortion rights in the U.S., and how we’re supporting our local partners to engage in advocacy on the international level. We also share here how the Ford Foundation is investing WEI’s organizational resiliency to ensure our future and the future of the movement.

I am so proud to be part of this amazingly powerful movement that is inclusive of our global community’s diverse identities and lived experiences. And I thank you for your part in the strengthening of this movement and for joining me in this electric and challenging moment were in together.

Gracias,

Maryangel Garcia-Ramos Guadiana
Executive Director