APC since Beijing 1995: Shaping a feminist internet

From 10 to 21 March, 2025, the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69) will take place at the United Nations headquarters in New York, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

APC staff, members and partners will engage extensively throughout CSW69 by hosting, presenting and participating in numerous events and “helping shape the conversation about gender equality in our digital age.” We see it is an important opportunity to examine the commitments made in 1995 and review the successes and shortfalls since that time, contextualised in today’s digital realities. While human rights are at the heart of the Beijing Declaration, which remains a foundational piece of advocacy grounding the feminist and gender movement, it is nonetheless a pre-internet document that does not fully reflect the widespread digital transformation of recent years, particularly its impact on women and gender-diverse populations.

As we advance in our advocacy for inclusive, safe and meaningful internet connectivity, it is imperative to recognise and address emerging issues that were not originally contemplated but are now crucial to ensuring comprehensive rights for women and girls in all their diversities in the digital era. The APC network will use the opportunity of CSW69 to engage and mobilise feminists, women rights organisations, tech activists and digital rights organisations to come together for collective sense-making, countering agendas and policy siloes, and enabling intentional connections between key policy processes.

The Association for Progressive Communication (APC) participated in the 68th edition of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), an intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women, where the priority theme was “Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective”.

From 11 to 22 March 2024, APC’s participation in New York was centred on promoting and sharing its work in the field of human rights, most specifically the rights of women and people of diverse genders and sexualities. The occasion also served to share APC’s current work and focus on digital rights, including WRP’s experience on technology-facilitated, gender-based violence (TFGBV) and disinformation, and LocNet’s experience on community networks and feminist infrastructures. The meet included the promotion of the Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPIs) as a vital framework for women’s rights to interact with digital technologies from diverse perspectives and locations.

Moreover, as part of our coordinated efforts with different civil society organisations (CSOs) and UN agencies to include gender at the heart of the Global Digital Compact (GDC), it became one of our priorities to have multiple stakeholders convene and discuss how to encourage governments’ commitments to advocate a feminist GDC to protect, promote, and respect the rights and choices of women, including their economic agency.

APC’s main focus throughout its participation at CSW68 was shifting the argument of “strengthening of institutions” to questioning current power structures and reconfiguring the priority to place people and justice at the centre. This entails prioritising the needs, experiences and perspectives of individuals, particularly women and girls in all their diversity, while formulating guidelines and plans for development.

The sixty-seventh session of the CSW took place from 6 to 17 March 2023 in New York and considered the priority theme of "Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls". This was the first CSW in its history to have such a specific focus on gender equality and digital technologies.

APC participated  and influenced conversations and spaces around online gender-based violence, freedom of speech, gender digital divide, disinformation and cybersecurity.

Beyond focusing the conversation on technology and gender around "empowerment" and "innovation", APC highlighted the importance of placing at the centre the full realisation of human rights, participation, security and well-being, through producing, sharing and making visible global feminist perspectives and analysis about the priority theme. This includes the importance of inclusion and meaningful participation of all women and girls, in all their diversity, in the digital space and decision making at all levels of use, design, management and governance of digital technologies, to strengthen human rights and advance gender equality.

In 2023, APC's expertise in addressing online gender-based violence was recognized through their inclusion in the Steering Committee of the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse. Alongside UN Women, UNICEF, and UNFPA, APC helped guide this international initiative addressing digital violence.

This participation demonstrated APC's established leadership in the field and their ability to influence global responses to online gender-based violence. It represented a culmination of years of research, advocacy, and programming addressing the intersection of gender and technology.

In 2018, APC expanded its focus on infrastructure with the launch of the Local Networks initiative (LocNet). This program supported community-based approaches to connectivity, recognizing that meaningful access requires solutions developed by and for local communities.

LocNet represented APC's commitment to addressing structural barriers to digital inclusion, moving beyond policy advocacy to support practical alternatives to dominant connectivity models. It exemplified APC's understanding that digital rights require both policy frameworks and concrete infrastructure solutions.

In 2018, APC launched the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN), conducting research at the intersection of feminism, internet, and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. This initiative created a network of researchers examining these issues from diverse global perspectives.

FIRN exemplified APC's commitment to evidence-based advocacy, producing knowledge that could inform policy and practice while building research capacity within feminist movements. The network represented an important step in developing more robust understandings of how gender and technology interact across different contexts.

All Women Count: Take Back the Tech! was a four-year project from 2017 to 2020 being coordinated by APC’s Women's Rights Programme (WRP) under the All Women Count consortium.

The consortium’s concern was violence against women, in particular violence experienced by women, girls and trans* people at risk (LBT, sex workers and women and girls with disabilities). As such, the consortium will strengthen the ability of global South-based human rights organisations and activists to advance legal and policy responses to VAW, change harmful social norms, and build the capacity of women, girls and trans people at risk to combat violence and advocate for their rights.

This submission was presented by APC in 2017 to render visible the impact of online gender-based violence (GBV) on women’s rights for more than a decade. APC worked with women's organisations and advocates to identify, monitor, analyse and combat uses of the internet and digital technologies that are harmful to women and marginalised communities, and with individual internet users to assist them in using technology to document and combat online GBV and challenge harmful sexist online practices. We also advocated internet policy and regulation that enable the expression, protection and promotion of human rights, women's rights, and the rights of people of diverse sexualities to both states and private sector actors.
This submission draws on the above experience as well as that of working with partners in the global South to understand, respond to and prevent online GBV. It takes the perspective that online GBV is part of the continuum of violence against women and as such occurs in all countries, contexts and settings, is one of the most pervasive violations of human rights, and is a “manifestation of the historically unequal power relations between men and women and systemic gender-based discrimination.”

Synthesizing decades of work at the intersection of gender, development, and technology, APC published the "Feminist Action Framework on Development and Digital Technologies." This comprehensive resource provided practical guidance for applying feminist principles to technological development processes.

The framework represented a significant contribution to feminist approaches to technology, translating theoretical commitments into actionable strategies. It demonstrated APC's role as a knowledge leader, offering concrete tools for implementing feminist visions of technological development.

APC provided input to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report on the gender digital divide. Their advocacy ensured the report addressed technology-facilitated gender-based violence as a key barrier to women's digital participation.

This work demonstrated APC's holistic approach to digital rights, recognizing that meaningful access requires addressing both infrastructural barriers and the hostile environments that prevent marginalized groups from fully participating in digital spaces.

The APC Women’s Rights Programme (APC WRP) developed the FTX: Safety Reboot as a contribution to existing training guides on digital security but rooted in a feminist approach to technology. The FTX: Safety Reboot is a work in progress to assist trainers to enable activists to use the internet as a transformative public and political space, to claim, construct, and express ourselves more safely.

Our political framing and tool for analysis are the Feminist Principles of the Internet (http://feministinternet.org), which shape and inform our work. The FPIs build our case for a safe, open, diverse and gender-just internet.

The launch of FTX: Safety Reboot represented an evolution in APC's approach to digital security, recognizing the changing landscape of online threats facing women and marginalized communities and developing new strategies to address them.

FTX creates safe spaces of exchange and experience where the politics and practice of technology are informed by local, concrete and contextual realities of women. These spaces aim to build collective knowledge and ownership. We are conscious of power relations which can be easily set up, particularly around technology, an area where women are historically excluded and their contributions invisibilised. We advocate for change through working towards consciously deconstructing these power relations.

The APC Women’s Rights Programme (APC WRP) developed the FTX: Safety Reboot as a contribution to existing training guides on digital security but rooted in a feminist approach to technology. The FTX: Safety Reboot is a work in progress to assist trainers to enable activists to use the internet as a transformative public and political space, to claim, construct, and express ourselves more safely.

Our political framing and tool for analysis are the Feminist Principles of the Internet (http://feministinternet.org), which shape and inform our work. The FPIs build our case for a safe, open, diverse and gender-just internet.

The launch of FTX: Safety Reboot represented an evolution in APC's approach to digital security, recognizing the changing landscape of online threats facing women and marginalized communities and developing new strategies to address them.

FTX creates safe spaces of exchange and experience where the politics and practice of technology are informed by local, concrete and contextual realities of women. These spaces aim to build collective knowledge and ownership. We are conscious of power relations which can be easily set up, particularly around technology, an area where women are historically excluded and their contributions invisibilised. We advocate for change through working towards consciously deconstructing these power relations.

Building on their policy work, APC contributed to the Human Rights Council's resolution on violence against women in 2017, specifically focusing on online gender-based violence. This engagement ensured that digital dimensions of violence against women would be addressed within human rights frameworks.

APC's contribution to this resolution demonstrated their strategic approach to policy advocacy, working across different international mechanisms to create a comprehensive policy environment that recognizes and addresses technology-facilitated gender-based violence.

In 2015, APC expanded its approach to integrating gender perspectives in internet governance by holding regional Gender and Internet Governance eXchanges (gigX) prior to regional Internet Governance Forums in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. These forums created spaces for gender-focused dialogue within technical governance processes.

The gigX initiative represented APC's strategic approach to ensuring that gender considerations would be central to internet governance discussions. By creating these dedicated spaces, APC helped build capacity for more inclusive participation in technical decision-making processes that shape the internet.

On the first day of the 59th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 59) in New York, APC organised a high-level panel, “Reprioritising Section J of the Beijing Platform for Action: Critical issues on the human rights of women and girls and the internet”, in collaboration with the Permanent Mission of Estonia to the UN and with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the National Women’s Institute of Costa Rica (INAMU).

The session revisited section J of the Beijing Platform for Action and highlighted the crucial role that media and (ICTs) play in promoting and sometimes hindering women’s rights. This was one of the first reviews where the importance of addressing online gender-based violence against women was emphasized as well as ensuring women’s participation in ICT-related decision-making.

In 2014, APC published the first version of the Feminist Principles of the Internet, a groundbreaking framework developed through collaborative input from activists and advocates across sexual rights, women's rights, anti-violence, and internet rights movements. This document articulated a feminist vision for digital spaces. 

The Principles represented a significant contribution to conceptualizing what a feminist internet might look like, providing both analytical frameworks and practical guidance. This initiative demonstrated APC's leadership in developing new paradigms for understanding and shaping digital environments through feminist perspectives. These principles have been translated to multiple languages, promoting worldwide interaction and accessibility.

In 2011, APC WNSP changes its name to the APC Women’s Rights Programme to adapt and respond
to the changing context of its work and – because of its location within (and as a bridge between) the
women’s movement, sexual rights movement, and internet rights community – to have particular insight
into the interplay between these historically separate sites of struggle.

APC WNSP took a a closer look at internet censorship and surveillance practices from a gender perspective, which takes into account its potential impact to women’s rights and realities and how gender considerations affect the development of research methodologies. The research looks at censorship and surveillance practices as they impact on gender relations, and studies actors and their interest at the government level and within civil society. It also looks at gender related aspects in policy formulation while examining the social, political and economic impacts of those practices on gender relations.

In 2005, APC began researching issues related to sexuality and the Internet, particularly in the context of content regulation and women's communication rights. EROTICS was developed in several countries to answer: How do the Internet and ICT policies influence the sexual practices of women living in different socio-political, economic and cultural contexts?

The complex nature of the topic requires research to be conducted in two directions: 1) virtual practices and the use of the Internet in given digital spaces, and how this influences notions of sexual rights in society at large; 2) the impact of regulatory policies and censorship practices on sexuality, health and sexual rights.

This is how in 2008 the Exploratory Research on Sexuality and the Internet (EROTICS) research was born, exploring intersection of sex work, abortion rights, queer rights issues and the internet. Phase I of EROTICS undertook in-depth research in Brazil, Lebanon, India, South Africa and the USA with marginalised sections of society who use the internet in the exercise of their sexual rights, including young women, transgender communities and lesbian queer activists. It took place from June 2008 to June 2011. 

Take Back the Tech! is a call to everyone to take control of technology to end online gender-based violence. It is a global, collaborative campaign project that highlights the problem of technology-related gender-based violence, together with research and solutions from around the world.

Take Back the Tech! was initiated in 2006 by the APC Women's Rights Programme and has grown into a diverse movement of individuals, organisations, collectives and communities. It is the result of research papers published in 2005 that looked at the connection between ICT and online gender-based violence, an issue that received little attention or discussion at that time. After sharing the findings with women's rights and communication rights advocates in different spaces, APC found this to be a critical issue that compelled further attention and deeper engagement.

Launched in 2006, GenderIT.org is a groundbreaking resource site that provides feminist reviews and commentary on internet policy and culture. It started as a site monitoring policy developments on ICT and gender, and from its beginnings has been unique. Initially it was one of the first sites looking at ICT policy through a gender lens. Many years later, GenderIT.org remains a unique space for its focus on the global South, its focus on those working at the grassroots level (grounded in the experience of women and gender non-conforming people in the society in which they live), and its emphasis on both advocacy and social justice.

In 2005, in Uganda, WENT focused on free and open source software solutions (FOSS) in women’s organisations in Africa by building awareness and support for the use of FOSS. WentAfrica2005 began in early December at Kampala, Uganda and aimed to build the capacities of women and their organisations in Africa to utilise new Information and Communication Technologies in social development work and policy advocacy. Women from Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon, Zambia, Sudan, Cameroon, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Senegal participated in the second WENT Africa workshop.

The use of ICTs by African women's NGOs was steadily increasing. Not only were there more users at the time, there were also more women and organisations that saw the important contribution ICTs could make to their efforts. 

The first Women's Electronic Network Training (WENT) Africa started in 2003 with a workshop on the strategic use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). A total of 24 women participated in the WENT Africa 2003 workshop. These participants were women whose organisations played a significant role in promoting the use of ICTs to enhance women's roles and capacity in social and policy advocacy, as well as to strengthen women's organisations and networks in Africa. WENT Africa 2003 used the Asia and Pacific Women's Electronic Network Training Workshop as a model and source of methodology. The Asian WENT has proved to be a highly popular and successful methodology, with workshops being held annually since 1999. 

GEM is an evaluation methodology that integrates a gender analysis into evaluations of initiatives that use ICTs for social change. It is an evaluation tool for determining whether ICTs are really improving or worsening women’s lives and gender relations, as well as for promoting positive change at the individual, institutional, community 

GEM was developed in 2002 from the ground up with women from the South. The methodology was developed based on real-life experiences in the ICT field, from engaging with ICT policies to ICT practices. Feedback from these ICT practitioners and women's rights activists were based on their own realities of how best to assess their work in examining the differential impact of ICT on women and men. These experiences are documented in various reports: Asia, Central East Europe, Latin America and broader social levels.

GEM has been used by hundreds of development initiatives around the world since 2002.

Photo by Fantsuam Foundation, in the implementation of GEM Methodology

The research forms part of a holistic APC-Africa-Women and FEMNET programme of activities related to the Beijing+5 process in Africa and internationally. Forty-two women from sixteen countries in east, west, north and southern Africa were interviewed, in addition to extensive research. The report outlines the issues and makes key recommendations.

On 2000, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) published "Women in Sync", a collection of stories about the experiences of women and their organisations who were part of the APCWNSP network. Women in Sync was designed to be a toolkit for women's electronic networking.

This three part toolkit is a reflection of lessons learned as a network and an acknowledgement of the challenges that were faced at that time.

In March 1999, APC Women's Networking Support Programme and Green Net led WommenAction, a coalition network of members from around the world at the first PrepCom for Beijing Plus Five in New York, three NGO working groups were formed to discuss:

•    the Beijing Plus Five overall framework;
     NGO access and participation problems;
     NGO alternative or shadow reports on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action.

Women's media networks, both global and regional, met as a Global Communications Forum with many NGOs, and discussed ways in which women could remain in touch once they returned home to their regions and countries, and be able to participate fully in the review process. 

Out of this Forum came the initial plans for this WomenAction 2000 Network. 

The Women's Networking Support Program of APC conducted a survey on women's experiences with electronic networking. Early results are from 30 countries in Africa (Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Zimbabwe), Asia and the Pacific (Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines), Eastern Europe (Croatia, Russia Federation, Ukraine), Western Europe (Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK), Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay), Western Asia (Jordan) and North America (Canada and United States). Initial findings indicated that women are increasingly active in using electronic communications, and that many tools such as E-mail have become a routine part of their day-to-day communications activity. Increasingly, women are experimenting with on-line conferences, mailing lists and web sites. At the same time, the survey showed that women continue to face barriers in using the information superhighway, such as lack of training and the high cost of equipment and, in some places, of getting connected. 

APC-Africa-Women was created as a network of organisations and individuals that work to empower African women’s organisations to access and use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for equality and development. APC-Africa-Women became the Africa regional programme of APC’s Women’s Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP)

In the 90s and 2000s, APC-Africa-Women (AAW) became one of the strongest regional networks associated with APC WNSP, and had over 70 members. These included organisations and individuals, both Anglophone and Francophone, all of which work empowering African women's organisations to access and use ICTs for equality and development. 

AAW was the African regional network of APC WNSP, but it  operated within its own context and responded to the needs of local
communities. To this extent, it operated both collectively and autonomously in the network structure. Since its first official activity in 1996, AAW succeeded in raising African women's awareness of ICTs and broadening the strategic use of ICTs by women in important social justice and development processes

In a landmark achievement, APC successfully advocated for the inclusion of Strategic objective J.1 in the Beijing Platform for Action: "Increase the participation and access of women to expression and decision-making in and through the media and new technologies of communication." This pioneering policy work connected women's networks globally and established the critical link between technology access and women's rights. 

This early policy victory demonstrated APC's effectiveness in translating grassroots digital experiences into formal international commitments. It represented a culmination of years of network-building and established a foundation for future policy work that would connect internet rights with women's rights frameworks.

The NGO Forum on Women '95, held in Huairou, China, from 30 August to 8 September 1995, was attended by 30,000 women and men as well as young girls and boys, it was the largest NGO Forum as well as the largest international gathering on women ever. 

The Forum organized business and telecommunications centers to provide participants with efficient and accessible communications services. The two computer centers offered access to word-processing and e-mail, while the business centers featured IDD lines, fax machines, and Internet links. 

In cooperation with the Women's Networking Support Program of the APC, the NGO Forum offered participants access to a wide range of electronic communication services, including e-mail, electronic conferencing, databases, World Wide Web, Gopher, Internet navigation tools, electronic retrieval and dissemination of UN and NGO Forum documents, user support, training and information facilitation. APC provided these services free of charge at both the NGO Forum business and press centers and at the UN conference in Beijing for NGOs and government delegates. Led by an all-women team from 24 countries, APC offered user support and training in 18 languages. This was the first time an all-women technical team operated the computer system at a UN Conference or NGO Forum.

Recognizing the critical need for women's perspectives in shaping technology, APC established the Women's Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP). This dedicated program became a cornerstone of APC's commitment to ensuring women would not be left behind in the emerging digital landscape.

Since 1993, the APC WNSP has played a leading role in gender and ICT advocacy in national, regional and international arenas. The ICT policy work began during the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Since then, the 'gender and ICT' agenda has steadily gained legitimacy as a serious area of concern through painstaking work by women's groups and gender and ICT advocates

In May 1990, seven pioneering organizations from around the world joined forces to establish the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). This watershed moment marked the beginning of a coordinated global network committed to harnessing the power of emerging digital technologies for social justice and progressive change worldwide.