A Feminist Action Agenda for Canada’s Global Response to COVID-19

Auteur
Action Canada, Amnesty International Canada, the Equality Fund, Inter Pares, Nobel Women’s Initiative, and Oxfam Canada

Together with our allies from Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, Amnesty International Canada, the Equality Fund, Nobel Women’s Initiative, and Oxfam Canada, we have prepared a policy brief on why Canada needs a feminist response to COVID-19 and how it can be achieved.

A Feminist Action Agenda outlines the unique challenges women and girls have faced since the beginning of COVID-19, and how a feminist response could ensure hard won gains for women’s rights and gender equality are not lost.

In the brief, we call on the Government of Canada to take a leadership role in implementing a feminist response to COVID-19. The Feminist Action Agenda establishes five key principles to guide the government’s feminist response: southern-led, sustainable, standalone, safety and rights, and human security. It also outlines specific recommendations for the government, including increasing women’s rights and feminist movements’ resources and leadership, prioritizing violence against women and girls/sexual and gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health and rights programming in COVID-19 responses, and supporting respect for human rights and protecting women human rights defenders and LGBTI rights defenders, and more.