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

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. Read the brief here.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities around the world and laid bare the gaps in our current systems. Marginalized communities – particularly women and girls – have been the most affected. 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. A 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.

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