The Grassroots Women’s International Academy (GWIA) is an international forum created by grassroots women’s international networks to showcase and learn from their good practices. GWIA provides a structure for peer learning to identify and capture the abundance and sophistication of grassroots practices around the globe.

GWIA is about redefining governance and developmental roles and reframing the use of knowledge and resources from the perspective of what works on the ground.

The Grassroots Women’s International Academy aims at making the work of grassroots women both visible and influential in public policy and practice. It does so by enabling the creation and reproduction of a body of knowledge owned, nurtured and replenished by grassroots women. The GWIA format includes opportunities for peer learning as well as for up-scaling of grassroots practices. It is designed in a way that creates space for horizontal reflection and collective analysis of what is happening at the grassroots level. It is a place for community leaders and movement builders to meet and exchange experience, in order to harvest and frame grassroots knowledge from their own perspective. Conditions for replication and transfer are analyzed and linked to mainstream debates in a strategic way.

GWIA is a methodology for harvesting the knowledge grassroots women’s groups have gained by improving everyday life conditions for their families and communities. GWIA provides targeted spaces to grassroots innovators, particularly women, who often lack prominent spaces and opportunities – taken for granted by professionals – to articulate and share their experiences and develop the tools to disseminate them. The experiences of local women’s groups are often not documented in the usual circuits that disseminate global information. Their practices are more vulnerable to being disappropriated by mainstream actors, who are better equipped with packaging and dissemination tools. Formats like the GWIA are needed for grassroots groups to claim their knowledge and disseminate and upscale their practices in their own name.