Our Herstory

The Gender & Trade Coalition was initiated in March 2018 at a ‘think meeting' that Regions Refocus co-convened with the South Centre, which brought together feminist activists from around the world. Many of them were critical in shaping alliances active in the early 2000s, like the International Gender and Trade Network. These earlier alliances played an important role in highlighting the impacts of trade liberalisation on women, but contemporary feminist trade activists found themselves in a markedly different context. Where global economic governance institutions previously denied the gendered impacts of their policies, they were now co-opting women’s rights as a tool to deflect critiques and repackage and expand the neoliberal trade regime.

Participants agreed on the need to forcefully counter this co-optation, and to develop and articulate a collective feminist agenda for trade justice, particularly in the context of the December 2017 Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment coming out of the 11th WTO Ministerial in Buenos Aires in December 2017. We initiated the GTC towards this end, with the participants of this early think meeting forming an interim working group for the Coalition. Two of our early actions included an open letter on the first anniversary of the Buenos Aires Declaration on Women and Trade, and the GTC unity statement, which set out our collective values and agenda for organisations to endorse and join the Coalition.

We officially launched the GTC in March 2019 on the margins of the 63rd United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. At the same time, we convened a strategy meeting to adopt a governance structure and elect a steering group (SG) to replace the interim working group. In the following months, we also elected three Co-Chairs (Regions Refocus, Latin America Gender and Trade Network, and African Women's Development and Communications Network) and formed ‘Friends of GTC’, an advisory group made up of a mix of member and non-member organisations and individuals. The general membership is updated on their activities via our mailing list and is invited to participate in biannual Members’ Calls, as well as annual strategy meetings.