When the world says “all women,” does it mean all?

Ahead of International Women’s Day, Shahin Ashraf, Head of Global Advocacy at Islamic Relief, reflects on what it really means to stand with all women and girls, at a time when the funding that makes that promise real is being cut away.

Every year, as International Women’s Day approaches, I find myself asking the same question: who are we actually talking about?

This year, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) gathers in New York under the theme “All women and girls.” It is a theme that carries real weight – and a quiet challenge. Because the women I think about when I read those words are not the women who tend to feature in the campaign imagery.

I think about the women feeding displaced families in Sudan out of community kitchens built from nothing. The women in Yemen managing households on the edge of collapse, with no income, no safety net, and no end in sight. Adolescent girls in Bangladesh whose parents, facing impossible poverty, are quietly weighing up whether education is still a realistic option for their daughter.

When we say all women and girls, we must mean all.

A moment that should mean more

Since the Beijing Platform for Action, one of the most significant international commitments ever made to gender equality, there have been real gains. More girls are completing primary school than at any previous point in history. Rates of child marriage have fallen, though they remain far too high. Adolescent birth rates have declined significantly over the past two decades.

These are not small things. Generations of advocates, community workers, and the women and girls themselves have fought hard for that progress.

But progress, as I have learned in over 25 years in this sector, is not a permanent condition. It requires sustained investment, political will, and above all, a willingness to keep showing up for the women who are furthest from the centre of global attention.

Right now, that willingness is being tested in ways that concern me deeply.

The funding crisis of gender equality

The scale of what has happened to global aid over the past year is still being calculated, but the direction is clear. The United States spent 2025 dismantling USAID and cutting billions from its foreign assistance portfolio. When Congress passed a $50 billion foreign aid bill in February 2026 – a 16% cut from the previous year–  programmes supporting gender equality were explicitly excluded.

Germany and the UK have made significant cuts of their own. The Human Rights Funders Network projects total global official development assistance could fall by $62 billion annually by 2026. For gender equality programming specifically, that means years of funded work – the health workers, the protection services, the livelihoods support – disappearing, not because it stopped being needed, but because the political will to fund it did.

I want to be careful about reducing this to numbers, because behind every figure is a programme that existed for a reason.

It means health workers who supported women’s access to maternal care will not be rehired. It means safe spaces for survivors of gender-based violence will close. It means the livelihoods support that was helping a widow in Yemen build something sustainable for her children ends – not because it wasn’t working, but because the funding ran out before the need did.

The threats that women and girls face have not paused just because the money has.

What we are seeing in Sudan

In Sudan, where the conflict now entering its third year has created one of the world’s most severe hunger crises, Islamic Relief is working with and documenting the takaaya. These are community kitchens, primarily run by women, which are the primary source of food for hundreds of thousands of people.

This is something I think gets lost in how we talk about women in crisis contexts. The narrative too often positions them as recipients of our concern, rather than as people who are already leading. Our job is not to rescue but to resource, to protect, and to make sure that what these women are doing is visible in the spaces where decisions about their futures are made.

That means being in rooms like CSW. It means holding donor governments to the commitments they made in Beijing 3 decades ago. And it means being honest about the gap between the language of gender equality and the reality of how it is funded.

Faith calls us to justice

For Islamic Relief, our commitment to women and girls is not a policy position. It is rooted in something we hold to be true: that every person is deserving of dignity (karama) and that justice (adl) is not optional.

Our Islamic framework on gender justice reflects a clear understanding that the marginalisation of women and girls is not natural,  inevitable, nor acceptable. When we support a woman to access education, or healthcare, or protection from violence, we are acting on those values.

I also think there is a particular responsibility for Muslim communities globally at a moment like this. The resources of Islamic giving – zakat, sadaqah, waqf – represent an enormous and often underutilised capacity. Supporting women and girls who are most vulnerable is not separate from that tradition. It sits right at the heart of it.

What “all women and girls” requires of us

The Beijing Platform asked world governments to commit to gender equality not as an aspiration but as an obligation. CSW70 returns to that promise at exactly the moment when the funding that makes it real is being cut away.

I look forward to the day when International Women’s Day is a celebration, rather than a call to action. When we are marking achievements rather than defending ground. But we aren’t there yet. And the women who are furthest from safety, furthest from access, furthest from the rooms where decisions about their lives are made – they are the measure of whether we mean what we say when we say all.

Islamic Relief will continue to show up for them. In the field, in policy spaces, and in the moments when it would be easier to look away.

That, for us, is what this day is about.

Islamic Relief supports women and girls around the world to pursue education, access healthcare and build sustainable incomes. We also work to address harmful cultural practises that contribute to inequality. Please help us to continue this vital work. Donate now.