This strategic plan guides our collective scope, priorities, and approach from 2025 through 2029, while ensuring we respond to the evolving contexts and needs of IFEX members over the period. It builds on the proven strength of this network, on the progress we have achieved, and on all we have learned since we first began this work over 30 years ago, as well as over the course of the last five, often tumultuous, years.
Through a process led by members and informed by extensive consultations, we have made some key adjustments to further deepen the impact and sustainability of our work, while keeping firm hold of what makes IFEX successful.
The three thematic goal areas developed for our former plan– civic space, access to information, and safety and justice – have proven extremely effective and have been carried forward in the current plan. Following our success integrating equity and inclusion as a cross-cutting theme – which has resulted in surpassing our targets and bringing this lens more organically to all our work – we have now integrated network-building across all goal areas. This includes activities aimed at enhancing member organisational capacity and connections between members, while strengthening and diversifying connections with allies.
This plan will inform our work as we tackle existing and emerging realities, including the global rise in authoritarianism and dictatorships. We will bring intersectional responses to the growing impacts of technologies, including AI. We are also committed to promoting FoE&I rights among those addressing, and sharing information on, environmental issues.
We will continue our innovative and collaborative approach to establishing a holistic safety context for those whose FoE&I rights are most at risk and those who defend them. This includes journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society organisations – particularly those most marginalised due to their intersecting identities.
Members have continuously shared that while many elements contribute to the power of IFEX, it is the solidarity and opportunities for collaboration that are key to our success as a network. This is truly the foundation of IFEX and our work, and what makes us unique. This plan forefronts this shared commitment to connections, solidarity, and knowledge sharing, in line with our collaboration principles, as we develop into an even stronger network to take on the challenges ahead, together.