NEWSLETTER: Beth Woroniuk — Navigating Uncertainty with Evidence and Community
Navigating Uncertainty with Evidence and Community
A LETTER FROM BETH WORONIUK, SENIOR FELLOW OF THE FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY COLLABORATIVE
How do you navigate a world that feels so uncertain?
These words have rung in my ears ever since I read them in a recent article summarizing Canadian poll results.
It’s been a tough year for Canadians, for feminists, for the world. Economic uncertainty continues, driven in part by U.S. tariffs. In Ottawa (the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg nation), our summer was choked by wildfire smoke, driven by climate change. Defense spending escalates, driven in part by President Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state. Globally, news of genocide, displacement and despair dominate the headlines, walking hand-in-hand with figures documenting the plummet of resourcing that support the rights of women and LGBTQIA+ people.
Last month, through my fellowship with the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, we launched an analysis examining how feminist foreign policy countries invest official development assistance (ODA) in gender equality. When we crunched the numbers, we found some good news. Compared to their counterparts, countries with feminist foreign policies:
Invested more of their ODA budgets in gender equality, including initiatives aimed at preventing and responding to gender-based violence;
Invested five times more (on a percentage basis) in women’s rights organizations;
More frequently launched new ways of funding feminist organizations and movements.
Unpacking how ODA supports gender equality priorities is one way to understand the potential of feminist foreign policies. Here in Canada, the 2017 Feminist International Assistance Policy included a target focused on new, ambitious gender equality investments. Under the new policy, 15 per cent of Canadian bilateral ODA would focus on gender equality objectives. This served to focus attention and raise ambition. It encouraged the establishment of two important signature initiatives: the Equality Fund and Women’s Voice and Leadership. These were designed to move resources dependably and with less red tape to drastically under-funded women’s rights organizations — which we know to be critical for progress on gender equality as much as the protection of democracy, action on climate change and effective humanitarian response.
As I found in my research (explored further below) and as we saw in Paris, countries in the feminist foreign policy cohort are poised to innovate, to experiment, to increase ambition at a time when it is most needed.
However, these gains are now under threat as ODA budgets are slashed, even by countries with feminist foreign policies, with a recorded 9 per cent decline in 2024 and an anticipated 9-17 per cent drop in 2025. Even with efforts from the feminist foreign policy countries, this is a dire outlook for the global women’s rights movement.
With that in mind, I want to share why supporting the Collaborative matters now more than ever. Looking forward to 2026, I — like many of you — see deep uncertainty: uncharted waters made more turbulent by key donors’ retreat. Yet despite these challenges, I find steady ground in the community we have cultivated and the methods we have refined over nearly a decade. I remember when the Collaborative’s Global Partner Network for Feminist Foreign Policy was a small initiative at the International Center for Research on Women. And I remember our work quietly shaping a guiding vision for moments just like this.
Today, we stand as a united global network of thinkers, advocates and policymakers. In this moment, the Collaborative offers what is urgently needed: rigorous evidence to inform policy, trusted spaces for collaboration among unlikely allies and sharper, smarter strategies for officials and advocates alike.
Feminist foreign policy is a compass — and your support helps us at the Collaborative hold it steady.
In solidarity,
Beth Woroniuk
Senior Fellow, Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative