Introducing our Strategic Plan 2025

The staff and board of IWDA are proud to launch our updated Strategic Plan 2025. Building on the foundations of our Strategic Plan 2020-2023, the plan sets out the three goals, five strategies and eleven objectives that will guide us as we work towards achieving gender equality for all.  

Download the IWDA Strategic Plan 2025

Our Strategic Plan 2025 represents an evolution from its previous iteration as we work to refine our approach to defending and advancing the rights of diverse women, girls, trans and gender-diverse people within an ever-changing external context.  

The plan solidifies IWDA’s third way between the models of women’s funds and international development NGOs as we remain committed to resourcing the work of diverse women’s rights organisations, enabling them to be more effective by providing support that goes beyond money, and making our own contributions to feminist movements through advocacy knowledge creation and translation.  

As an organisation located in the Minority World engaging in the development sector, an essential part of this work lies in taking actions to decolonise our approach to feminism and development.* With this plan, we are going further than we ever have to progress the decolonisation of our work and practices as we strive to become the best we can be at partnerships across the Majority and Minority World. Building on the 3S Framework we launched in our Strategic Plan 2020-2023, this plan introduces a new fourth S to allow us to better understand and leverage our locational power so that we know when to:  

STEP UP and use our power to leverage resources and access for women’s rights organisations, and make our own contribution to feminist movements. 

STAND WITH feminist movements in solidarity and amplify the work of Majority World actors. 

STEP BACK when others are better placed to take the lead. 

SIT WITH uncertainty, embrace communal learning and deep listening, and accept that time is needed to collectively discern the best course of action.**  

The Strategic Plan also highlights our commitment to addressing racial injustice wherever it pervades, including within our own organisation. We endeavour to listen, learn and act to become an explicitly anti-racist feminist organisation. As a settler organisation working on undecided sovereign lands, this means being committed to advancing First Nations justice in Australia.  

We will continue to make our own contribution to feminist movements and engage in cross-movement solidarity with disability inclusion, LGBTQIA+, anti-racism, First Nations justice and climate justice movements. It is only by working together across our movements that we can achieve our vision of gender equality for all.  

* IWDA chooses to use the term ‘Majority World’ in place of ‘global south’, ‘developing world’ or ‘third world’, and ‘Minority World’ in place of ‘global north’, ‘developed world’ or ‘first world’. This is a political choice, as using this language demonstrates that ‘global south’ populations and cultures are in the global majority, thereby challenging the problematic hierarchies implied by other commonly-utilised terminology. 

** “Step Up, Stand With, Step Back” is an adaptation of the framework proposed by Shirley Walters and Shauna Butterwick in their 2017 publication, Moves to Decolonise Solidarity Through Feminist Popular Education. “Sit with” was added to the framework based on feedback provided to IWDA by Alfred Deakin Professor and Chair in Race Relations, Yin Paradies.