2020
In 2020, DAWN launches two major initiatives in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic under the umbrella of Pandemic Portals. The first, Policy Transformations (PT), offers a critical feminist analysis of state responses across four key areas: Macroeconomics, Labour Policies and Workers’ Rights, Migration and Human Mobilities, and Care and Social Protection. Policy Transformations highlights how policy decisions during the pandemic have reinforced structural inequalities and shaped everyday realities, particularly for women and marginalised communities in the global South. The results of this intensive research are published as a book in July 2025.
The second initiative, the Feminists for a People’s Vaccine (FPV) Campaign, led jointly by DAWN and the Third World Network (TWN), foregrounds feminist principles of justice and solidarity in global health. FPV advocates for equitable, affordable, and accessible COVID-19 vaccines, medicines, therapeutics, and PPEs, bringing a gender lens to the People’s Vaccine Campaign. Over the past five years, the campaign has produced a rich body of work—including Issue Papers analysing TRIPS, corporate control of health technologies, and pandemic-exacerbated inequalities—alongside podcasts, cartoons, and multilingual resources to make complex issues accessible. Through regional workshops, social mobilisation, and targeted advocacy, FPV strengthens Southern feminist networks, amplified Global South voices in global health debates, and offers actionable strategies for shaping more just, gender-responsive responses to current and future pandemics.
DAWN also launches DAWN Talks, a series of critical conversations with Southern feminists examining how the COVID crisis exposed and intensified structural inequalities. Discussions interrogated biopolitics, social protection for informal workers, intellectual property regimes, HIV, and necropolitics, while also offering feminist perspectives from China and other contexts. The series highlights the social, economic, and political fractures laid bare by the pandemic, as well as the extraordinary—and often uneven—responses of states and institutions.