Press and Publications

Indigenous women climate defenders from around the globe are taking a stand for climate justice and women’s rights at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) this week in New York. 

It’s impossible to tell the story of MADRE without Mirna. In many ways, Mirna made MADRE possible.

Where we work on the remote, north coast of Nicaragua, women face high rates of abuse. But in their isolated and impoverished communities, these women often lack access to vital information on lifesaving support services. With your support, our human rights radio station is changing that. 

The Trump administration continues to show that it doesn’t care about women, in the US or around the world. Yesterday, in one of this administration’s latest assaults on women, the State Department cut all US funding to the UNFPA, a United Nations agency that provides a wide range of lifesaving maternal and reproductive health care worldwide.

Terrified families are trapped in intensifying violence with nowhere to turn. But through your support of MADRE, you have helped reach them with lifesaving care. As we speak, our on-the-ground partners, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), are in eastern Mosul preparing to open a new shelter for women and families escaping US airstrikes. There, they will receive vital safe haven and care, including food and medical aid. 

We the undersigned organizations are writing to express our deep concerns about the US Mission to the United Nations’ selection of representative from the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) to join its official delegation to the 61st annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). 

Today, as the United Nations begins its annual gathering on women’s rights, a coalition of international women’s, LGBTIQ, and immigrant justice organizations have launched a joint initiative called: No Borders on Gender Justice.

We the undersigned organizations write to express our deep concerns about the latest restrictions on civil society participation at the 2017 UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meetings. This year's CSW is taking place under the shadow of the United States’ escalated anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and anti-Muslim policies, which are preventing some women from exercising their right to political participation at UN Headquarters in New York. The policies represent the latest in a long history of restrictive migration, refugee and asylum measures that subject women and their families to hate crimes, detention, deportation and family separation, while undermining core universal human rights regarding migrant and refugee rights, and worker protections. These circumstances emphasize the urgent need for women facing multiple discriminations to be at the center of conversations on human rights at CSW.

“It makes us happy that we hear the men from our communities are listening to the radio and saying ‘no more violence’ and acknowledging that women have rights.” This is how Luisa Ruiz* described the change brought to her community by the “Voices of the Women of Wangki Tangni” project, which established the first radio station to focus on women’s rights in the North Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.

At the end of last year, MADRE traveled to Nicaragua to meet with women who take part in Harvesting Hope. That’s the Indigenous women’s farming project you support on the impoverished north coast of Nicaragua. We visited the community of Kisalaya, where we meet with women farmers to discuss the challenges they face and how they work together to overcome them. 

Thank you for helping us offer healing to sexual violence survivors in Colombia.