Advancing gender equality requires unlearning as much as learning

Women’s rights and gender equality movements are navigating a challenging reality, where changing political environments, shifting public discourse and uncertain funding conditions are affecting their ability to act, connect and lead. UN Women’s 2025 report notes that, among the 159 countries reviewed, almost a quarter report that backlash against gender equality is as a barrier to implementing the Beijing Platform for Action.  

For feminist movements to remain resilient, influential and sustainable, learning must move beyond accountability requirements and become a collective process that strengthens solidarity, builds power and supports locally led action. 

However, the way learning is understood and valued within the development sector is being questioned.  Too often, learning is designed to serve donor reporting and accountability purposes, instead of supporting knowledge generation that is meaningful and relevant to those at the centre of our efforts – in this case, the women’s rights organizations and LGBTQI+ groups with whom we work.  Hence, learning is perceived as extractive and disconnected from the realities of movements themselves. As Cooperation Canada’s 2026 guide on practical insights for locally-led development emphasizes, recognizing these barriers is essential to reimagining learning as a resource and a source of power.  

As the Women’s Voice and Leadership Learning Partnership shapes its collective learning journey, conversations with gender equality and women’s rights advocates across 31 countries are surfacing insightful reflections, including through a Women Deliver 2026 dialogue focused on one central question: What collective learning is most urgently needed for feminist organizations to drive meaningful change and challenge harmful social norms and practices? 

What movements for gender equality are seeking to unlearn

Feminist movements are actively rethinking their approaches and strategies. They are seeking to move away from: 

• Dependence on concentrated donor funding—especially from a small number of Northern donors—limits movements’ autonomy and leaves them vulnerable to shifting aid priorities. The Alliance for Feminist Movements’ 2025 funding snapshot shows that only 4% of official development assistance has gender equality as a principal objective, with five donors providing 57% of total funding. 
• Competition for scarce resources: In 2022, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development reported that nearly half of women’s rights and feminist organisations in the Global South operate on annual budgets of less than USD30,000 (about CAD42,000), highlighting the need for more collaborative approaches that strengthen trust, solidarity and collective action.  
• Divisions within and across movements: Recognizing that unity does not require full agreement, movements are increasingly seeking ways to hold difference and disagreement while organizing around shared priorities and principles, such as the human rights-based approach framework.  
• One-size-fits-all approaches: Feminist language, strategies and solutions must be adapted to local realities through equitable partnerships, shared decision-making and mutual accountability. 
• Static messaging: Movements need more compelling, evidence-based narratives that connect the “why” of feminist work with the “how,” including processes, relationships and implementation to makes it real in everyday life. 

What movements for gender equality are seeking to learn

At the same time, feminist organizations are identifying areas where collective learning could strengthen movement resilience, influence and impact: 

• Building collective power by working across movements, learning from autonomous resourcing and collective care and critically examining how anti-rights actors mobilize, including through technology and artificial intelligence.  
• Strengthening organizations by building capacity in data, evidence and inclusive Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning processes to help understand what works and how change happens. 
• Sustaining care-centred, community-led approaches that recognize individual and collective well-being as essential to long-term movement resilience. 
• Deepening strategic advocacy by understanding power dynamics, strengthening communications and developing clear, targeted engagement strategies. 

Looking ahead: putting these insights into action

The challenge now is turning these insights into sustained action. Learning must be resourced, protected and led by those closest to the work. This means treating learning as core movement infrastructure—not an add-on or reporting requirement. Funders and partners should support the time, space and relationships that enable women’s rights organizations to reflect, adapt and build evidence. Relatedly, peer-exchange to develop shared strategies and learn across contexts can be valuable to their actions, leading to adoption of new tactics and strategies. Recent IDRC evaluations including for the Legal Empowerment Learning Agenda initiative found that this approach strengthens community agency and empowerment while expanding actionable, policy-relevant evidence to drive reforms.  

The path forward? Listen deeply and create the conditions for movements advancing gender equality to learn on their own terms. In a time of backlash and uncertainty, this is not just a learning agenda—it is a strategy for advancing agency, solidarity and gender justice.