International Women’s Day & Women’s Month: Centering Care and Feminism
This International Women’s Day & Women’s Month, we reaffirm that in the face of rising authoritarianism, conflict, and regressive policies that threaten our communities and our planet, care and feminism must be at the center.
Throughout March, we stand together to expose these injustices and emphasize the power of care, feminism, collective action, and global solidarity in defending human rights related to habitat.
📢 Read the message from the HIC Presidency and help amplify this call for justice with our March’s Campaign: https://www.hic-net.org/care-and-feminism-womens-month-2025/
For ALL Women and Girls: Rights, Equality, Empowerment
By Grace Chikumo – Mtonga, HIC President
Habitat International Coalition (HIC) celebrates women and girls around the world. In the tapestry of different social beliefs, geopolitical conflicts, sexual violence, lack of access to services, and deprivation of economic empowerment, HIC calls for action on the Beijing Declaration’s commitments, marking 30 years since its adoption.
As the world grapples with wars in Palestine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine and others, HIC remembers the women and girls, young children, the youth and the aged that have been displaced from their homes, struggling to access basic amenities that are critical for their survival. This crisis coupled with climate disasters has pushed many women and girls into a vicious cycle of poverty and marginalization. Moreover, in the current context we see a rise in direct persecution of mobilized groups fighting for women’s rights, with a deliberate targeting of the feminist agenda, including measures to promote socio-economic equality and ensure reproductive rights.
During the month of March 2025, HIC calls for immediate action for care of women and girls challenging the world systems that are driving all forms of violence against women and girls. Governments should invest in long-term gender equality transformation with a focus on rebuilding women’s resilience through tangible socio-economic empowerment and development of technologies that incorporate women’s needs to effectively respond to climate disasters. It is time to ACT; through policies and systems that promote gender equality while elevating the voices of women and girls in decision making processes and dismantling patriarchal systems and barriers that hinder the full realization of women and girls’ rights to live a life of dignity. Governments the world over should deliberately uphold women’s and girls’ rights by establishing structures that promote protection and care through securing their right to land, housing, economic resources and health care. HIC calls for an end to wars that have placed women and girls in harm’s way of all forms of violence especially sexual abuse, loss of home and property, deprivation to economic empowerment and education which is an equalizer to development.
HIC demands that all perpetrators of violence against women are held accountable. #Forallwomenandgirls: Rights Equality Empowerment
#ForAllWomenAndGirls
Feminism and Collective Action: Building Justice through Resistance
By Guillermo Marzioni, HIC Vice President
Women and dissidents face gender inequality, discrimination and multiple obstacles to exercising our rights. Sexual and domestic violence, lower wages, lack of access to education and inadequate healthcare are just some of the difficulties we face. In addition, occupational segregation, stereotypes and customs limit our opportunities, while barriers to exercising property rights and lack of access to resources and technology perpetuate inequality.
Gender dissidents reject the imposed norm of how people should behave according to their gender and strive for the recognition of our identity, which encompasses the body, desire, sexuality, denomination and self-perception.
And we fight even harder for state assistance for the social inclusion of our colleagues who suffer poverty and indigence as heads of household, with many children, as carers and providers.
Today more than ever, it is essential to make visible our contributions as women, lesbians, trans, transvestites and non-binary people, as well as to develop projects that promote the production of knowledge from our own experiences. As an inter-regional coalition, we believe in and defend multinational meetings and groups that manage work collectively, examples of how we can organise ourselves through economic self-management.
For these reasons, in the face of the deepening of an intolerant and conservative agenda that persecutes dissent, organised communities and human rights defenders, we reinforce our commitment to the position that our participation and that of our organisations must incorporate a feminist, anti-patriarchal, anti-imperialist and decolonising perspective. This approach is essential to build a fairer society, from our labour, fraternal or family relationships, but also in the construction of intimacy in our love relationships. It also means bringing practices to the group level, in our communities, in our spaces of work, of artistic, religious, educational and social expression. And to move forward with popular power to shape public policies in the legal-administrative structures of our nation states and the postulates of interstate organisations with a global reach.
Solidarity in Action!
