WHERE IS THE MONEY FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS?

Background

Where is the Money for Women’s Rights? (WITM) is a multi-year action-research initiative founded in 2004 to gain a better understanding of funding trends for women’s rights work and how best to expand the resource base for feminist movements and women’s rights organizations.

We believe that women’s ability to mobilize, participate in and shape the future relies not only in freedom and respect for our rights but also depends on a certain level of economic resources. Women’s organizations around the world require financial resources to make change happen: quality funding is needed to secure women’s rights!

Aims

The WITM initiative therefore aims to:

• Achieve a significant increase in access to, and the amount of funding to support women’s rights work, particularly of women’s organizations and movements all over the world.
• Improve the effectiveness of women’s organizations to raise, absorb and use more funds to build stronger movements and advance women’s rights globally.

Activities

• Research and Publications:

The FundHer Reports analyse the available resources and the role of donors in the promotion of women's rights. Based on statistical data collected through three online surveys, these reports address fundamental questions related to resource mobilization and movement-building.

Where is the Money for Women's Rights? (2006)

Financial Sustainability for Women's Movement's Worldwide (2007)

FundHer Brief: Money Watch for Women’s Rights Movements & Organizations (2008)

You can also consult over 40 other resources including factsheets, audio files, articles and presentations on funding and women’s rights organizations in Spanish, French, English and Arabic.

• Strategy meetings:

Determined to create spaces for strategic dialogue around resource mobilization, the WITM team has organized numerous strategy meetings, bringing together women's rights organizations and donors to deepen the analysis of the funding situation for women’s organizations across regions, issues and sectors including violence against women, indigenous women and HIV/AIDS.

Regional meetings have taken place in the Middle East and North Africa (2008),Sub-Saharan Africa (2007),Brazil and Southern Cone (2007),the Pacific (2007) and Central America (2006).

• Advocacy with Donors:

A key aspect of the WITM strategic initiative is advocacy work to influence the policies and practices of donors in different funding sectors, with a particular focus on bilateral and multilateral agencies and women’s funds.

AWID and the WITM team continue to work with our allies globally to influence donor policies and practices to advance support for women’s rights organizations and movements.

To support the development of the relationships between women’s rights activists and donors, and to promote a better understanding within the donor community of the strategic priorities and financial challenges of women’s rights organizations, AWID encourages the active participation of funders in many of the strategy sessions and meetings we convene.

Activities in 2009

• Monitoring what has happened with newly created funds, mainly from bilateral agencies (such as the MDG3 Fund from the Dutch government), in order to track the commitments made by those donors and how the money available has been allocated.
• Analyzing the situation of funding for small organizations.
• Produce, together with the Young Feminist Activism initiative, a publication on funding for young women led work, as part of the Where is the Money for Young Women? research project.
• Continue with our advocacy actions, as well as further our follow up activities related to our strategy meetings.

In order to increase access to the information and insights generated by our initiative, in 2008 the WITM team launched its quarterly newsletter FundHer: Money Watch for Women’s Rights in English, French & Spanish.

To sign up for the newsletter, please e-mail us: fundher@awid.org

WITM Strategic Initiative Team

Lucía Carrasco Scherer - Program Assistant

Fernanda Hopenhaym – Manager