Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) is the leading feminist and membership-driven network that has over 330 organisational and individual members coming from 31 countries and territories across the region. APWLD’s membership is not just limited to women’s organizations but extends to women-led labor and environmental organizations. Their membership includes a wide range of organisations and networks that are led by women in all their diversities representing various issues such as trade unions, environmental groups, peasants, Indigenous and migrants’ organisations from all five sub-regions (Central Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Pacific). Their membership prioritizes marginalized women, including rural, Indigenous, migrant, urban poor, and differently-abed women and their communities.

As a member-driven network, APWLD’s work is designed to foster and strengthen autonomous feminist movements and amplify their impact through four key strategies:

• Capacity Development: APWLD works to build strong capacities of women in Asia and the Pacific to understand, analyze and document causes and consequences of the structural barriers on women’s human rights; and to organize, advocate and drive social, economic and political change.  One critical approach that explains APWLD’s holistic capacity development is the Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR).
• Knowledge, Tools and Resources: APWLD works with members and partners to co-create feminist knowledge, evidence, tools and resources to advocate for change (including regional analysis/reports, toolkits, thematic/policy submissions, media, press releases, videos, film, etc). APWLD’s knowledge tools are generated and owned by women and their communities to inform their collective work, policy advocacy and feminist movement organizing and collaboration.
• Advocacy: APWLD facilitates advocacy space and opportunities to engage with and influence policy makers at local, national, regional and international levels. Some of the key spaces where they work are relevant United Nations (UN) processes, including the Human Rights Council, Asia Pacific Forum for Sustainable Development (APFSD),  UN-High Level Political Forum (HLPF), Commission on the Status of Women (CSW66), Financing for Development and UNFCCC’s Conference of the Parties (COP), among others. APWLD was one of the key actors in the broader movement alliance which successfully advocated at the Climate COP for a loss and damage financial mechanism. It was also part of the many actors that successfully advocated for the first explicit reference to the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution in 2022.
• Movement Building: APWLD works to enable institutional structures and space to build alliances, coalitions, networks, and cross-movement collaborations that amplify feminist common demands and collectively drive change. APWLD has formed and leads critical cross-movement networks and alliances at regional and global levels including the Asia Pacific Regional CSO Engagement Mechanism (APRCEM), Women Human Rights Defenders International Coalition (WHRD-IC) and Gender and Trade Coalition (GTC). As a commitment to regional-level feminist movement building, APWLD organizes the Asia Pacific Feminist Forum (APFF), a tri-annual event offering a critical political space for feminist movements in the region to build shared political positions and analysis and form intersectional & intergenerational solidarity.