Reports suggest that women’s rights groups and organisations are facing challenges in finding resources for their work, which is central to development.
Traditional sources of funding for this aspect of development is said to be decreasing over the years.
A multi-year action-research initiative in 2005 by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) dubbed, “Where is the Money for Women’s Rights?”, to gain a better understanding of funding trends for women’s rights work and how best to expand the resource base, shows that the challenges of the current funding landscape are many.
This includes the support for women’s rights organizations. AWID emphasizes that without strong, vital and effective women’s organizations and networks all over the world, existing women’s rights achievements could be lost.
AWID is an international membership organization connecting, informing and mobilizing people and organizations committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women’s human rights.
Its goal is to cause policy, institutional and individual change that will improve the lives of women and girls everywhere.
It has called for an urgent need to increase the amount, quality and access of resources for women’s organizations worldwide, and to transform the way in which women’s organizations and movements relate with the issue of resources, from a logic of scarcity, to see funding and resource mobilization as a critical aspect of their political agendas and key for building strong feminist movements.
The research confirms the general feeling of women’s rights groups and organisations on the field in Ghana.
They keep asking about how and where to raise funds. There seem to be few interested funders, with too little money to support existing women’s rights organizations and initiatives, or is it that donors simply don’t understand the urgency and importance of their work?
As a first step to revive financing trends by bilateral donors and development partners, the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), a grant making organisation set up to provide grants to women’s organisations across the continent, with its regional secretariat in Accra, held a days forum to engage the partners at the national level to find ways to address the issue.
Speaking at the forum, the Executive Director of AWDF, Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi said it was necessary to engage their partners to remind them of her organization’s collaboration with women’s groups in Ghana, since it spends a lot of time mobilizing resources at the international level.
According to her, AWDF has since 2001 when it began operations done a lot to support African women structured along three areas.
“These include specific thematic areas, capacity building of the organisations that we support and movement building at national and regional level,” she stated.
She disclosed that the AWDF has through grants of $7.8 million supported 575 women organisations in forty African countries.
“Through AWDF’s support African women in various countries including Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, have been able to set up support centres for survivors of gender-based violence, a vocational training centre or ex-Trokosis in Ghana, support for groups of women living with HIV/AIDs and advocacy for disabled women’s rights.”
She added that the success of AWDF is equally the success of the work of its partners in helping poor marginalized women. Some grantees attributed their successes to the support by AWDF.
Dr. Rose Mensah Kutin, of NETRIGHT and Abantu for Development noted that there was a gap in resources to promote the work of gender equality on the development agenda.
She said women’s rights advocates have often turned to other partners for funds since the national budget itself does not make allocation for issues on women’s rights and even when it does through the women ministry it is minimal.
As a result, she said efforts towards mainstream gender considerations has resulted in out stream except the social service sectors which are least funded by development partners.
Ms Joana Foster founder of AWDF appealed to the development partners to look at the long term achievements of women’s rights programmes and not in the short term, since socialization which is an underlying factor to women’s rights especially in Africa, changes gradually.
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