Advocacy Campaigns

WLP’s advocacy strategy is to engage in multi-year, research-intensive, grassroots-driven advocacy campaigns. Our current campaigns include:

Take Action Survey #2 to determine how nationality laws affect children's education.

Claiming Equal Citizenship: The Campaign for Arab Women’s Right to Nationality supports a six-country regional campaign to raise awareness of discriminatory laws that deny women equal nationality rights and undermine women’s status as equal citizens in their home countries. The campaign calls for legal reform allowing women to confer their nationality to their husbands and children, full implementation of reformed laws, and recognition of women as equal citizens.

Read how the Iranian Parliament is attempting to push back family legislation by 42 years.

One Million Signatures: The campaign aims to collect one million signatures to demand an end to discriminatory laws against women in Iran. At present, men have the sole right to divorce and, except in special cases, the right to custody of children. One man’s testimony equals that of two women. A daughter receives half a son’s inheritance. The campaign is a continuation of Iranian women’s century-long struggle for gender equality.

To see the state of family law in Muslim-majority countries, click here.

Family Law Reform Campaign: Moroccan women’s rights activists achieved their goal in January 2004 when the government of Morocco adopted a new landmark Family Law supporting women’s equality and granting women new rights in marriage and divorce, among others. The Family Law Reform Campaign continues in other Muslim-majority countries.

Equality Without Reservation: Eliminating Discrimination against Women in the Arab Region - Appeal to all Arab Governments for the Withdrawal of Reservations and the Ratification of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW.

News & Events

Feminist demands and expectations from the forthcoming Ministerial Declaration

Whilst we welcome the nomination of the new cabinet members after a protracted period, the Nationality Campaign and the regional Equality without Reservation Campaign would like to remind the ministerial committee entrusted with the task of writing the Ministerial Declaration of the urgent need to seriously address the issue of citizenship rights and entitlements for women and men.

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( categories: Lebanon | Advocacy Articles | Advocacy Campaigns )

by Mahnaz Afkhami, former Minister of Women in Iran before 1979 and president of Women's Learning Partnership

The images from Iran in the last two weeks have stunned the world: hundreds of thousands of women and men marching peacefully, first in support of reformist candidates and later protesting the government's version of the results. Women played a prominent role at every level in this movement; in fact what unfolded in Iran would not have been possible without them. It is their quiet and thoughtful community organization, constituency building, message development, and pioneering use of the internet in recent years that accounts for the scope of the protest in Iran. Their grassroots mobilization has showed that more lies at the heart of democratization than burning tires and shouting slogans, and that a democracy requires more than ballot boxes and purple-inked fingers. And that accomplishment will prove consequential not only for Iran's future but also for the future of the whole Middle East.

As a student of the women's movement in my native land for nearly four decades and an intimate observer of their recent struggles, I can say with confidence that women's leading role in these events has been no accident. Iranian women began fighting for their rights over a century ago, at the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and have not stopped since. In the 1930s and 40s they formed their first effective associations. In the 1960s they struggled and succeeded in getting the right to vote and be elected and once in parliament they were able to replace archaic family laws with new progressive ones. In 1979, they joined the nation's drive for political freedom, but this time they did not get what they had fought for. The revolution swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power and in less than a month after his triumph, before there was a constitution or a government, the ayatollah annulled the new family law and decreed obligatory veiling and gender apartheid.