From November 14-17, 2008, over 1,500 women's rights activists from all over the world gathered in Cape Town, South Africa, to discuss and strategize about how to build stronger movements that advance women's rights and gender equality globally.

In addition to co-sponsoring the conference, the Global Fund actively participated in the conference – members of our staff, advisors, and grantee partners from all five regions of the world participated and presented at this historic conference.

Having supported over 3,700 groups with nearly $70 million over the last 20 years, the Global Fund is poised to enable us to play a key leveraging role in enabling social justice movements to reinforce each other's efforts in today’s highly challenging global political and socio-economic context.

The AWID Forum is the largest women’s convening outside of the UN, and takes place every three years. This year’s conference will build on the last conference titled ‘How does change happen?’ in 2005 held in Bangkok, Thailand.  Find out more in this special web section about what Global Fund is doing at AWID. We will be sharing more updates and report-backs from the conference in the coming days.