FEMNET advances economic justice through research and advocacy that challenges mainstream economic orthodoxies that perpetuate gendered inequalities and reimagines feminist alternatives for just, rights-based economies on the African continent. Our Economic Justice and Rights programme convenes movement building across its network and partners, focusing on strengthening linkages between women’s rights organisations, activists and feminist economists to advance macroeconomic policy shifts and regional, continental and international levels.
Some of the areas of focus we work on:
- Fiscal Policy and Tax Justice: Unpacks how fiscal policies such as austerity measures directly impact women’s rights and advances transformative gender-aware tax frameworks.
- Financing for Development: Addresses how access to public services in the context of increasing privatisation and commodification of goods and services, reduces access to these services. This work also highlights the increasing financialisation of everyday life and the effects this has on women’s rights on the continent. This work also ties in with our continued advocacy for the transformation of international financial institutions.
- Monetary and Economic Sovereignty: This emerging work in the programme contests mainstream economic frameworks that inhibit economic sovereignty by advocating for a transformed international financial architecture, in which Africa remains embedded on subordinate terms.
- The Care Economy: This work seeks to understand the contours of the care economy across Africa, and advance economic policies that recognise and radically reduce care work for women and girls.
- Debt Justice: We articulate how debt remains one of the central mechanisms of perpetuating existing gendered power relations both within the household and in our economies.
- Trade and Industrialisation: This work tracks the African Continental Free Area and sheds light on priorities for negotiations in terms of which sectors or reforms may disproportionately affect women, as well as the domestic policies needed to support opportunities from trade for women.
- Natural Resource Governance and Extractives: This work involves research and advocacy that makes visible the intersections of climate change, economic justice and women’s rights.
