Resource Net Friday File
Friday November 17, 2006

 

 

By Anna Turley, Women's Rights Information Manager, AWID

In 2005 AWID with Just Associates embarked on an action-research initiative
called 'Where's the Money for Women's Rights?' to examine the funding trends
related to gender equality work and support to women's rights organizations.
The results showed starkly that funding had gone down, and that women's
organizations were in a state of survival and resistence.

Since the launch of the report at the AWID Forum in Bangkok in October
2005, AWID has not only continued to monitor trends, we have also begun to
dialogue with women's rights advocates in the hopes of reversing this
trend. In doing so, we have learned that there are an increasing number of
opportunities, new sources of funding and 'pockets' of political will that
give us reason to be more optimistic than the numbers warrant. We've also
learned that there is a growing consensus amongst many leaders in women's
movements and progressive donors that our collective power needs to be
strengthened to ensure that women's rights are achieved not only in and of
themselves, but as a central strategy in ensuring that the challenges the
world faces today are overcome.

Taking advantage of this important moment, last week AWID in collaboration
with Semillas hosted a historical international meeting. From 9th - 11th
November more than 300 representatives of women's organizations (including
representatives from indigenous, youth, workers, migrant and lesbian
groups) as well as up to 50 donors (including representatives from
bilateral and multilateral agencies, public and private foundations,
international NGOs, individual donors and women's funds) gathered together
in Queretaro, Mexico to initiate a global conversation and strategy around
funding for women's organizations and movements.

The meeting aimed to contribute to promoting a significant increase in
access to and amount of funding to support women's rights work,
particularly women's organizations all over the world; and to improve the
effectiveness of women's organizations to raise and utilize more funds to
build stronger movements and progress gender equality globally. To do so,
paticipants came together around three key organizing questions in relation
to movement building: Where is the money? How do we get it? As a movement
what do we want to do with it?

Lessons learned

Throughout the meeting women's rights activists and donors from diverse
contexts, perspectives and politics debated these questions and together
named the challenges we face in terms of money and movements and
strategised how to transform them. We began a process of rethinking our
relationships with money and while realities vary tremendously for
different kinds of organizations in different contexts, some key messages
came through from this meeting.

Mindset: We need to change our collective mindset to move beyond a sense of
scarcity that fuels competition and prevents collaboration.

The personal (relationships to money) is political: We need to examine our
personal relationship with money. Some of us actually enjoy fundraising
while for others money is something that corrupts and that we do not want
to talk about.

Be bold and ask BIG: We need to bolder in our fundraising and start
thinking big. Many of the donors at the meeting urged us to do this. And we
need to reconceptualize our relationsip with the donors to move beyond an
'us' and 'them' opposition to find opportunities for collaboration at every
moment.

Consolidate and challenge our donor allies: We need to challenge our donors
and work together with feminists inside donor agencies. We need to ask
donors where the money is for work against institutions that undermine
women's rights and whether they are really willing to change the way they
think and give space to women, not just proposals and projects. We need to
ask for flexible money to spend as we wish. And we need to believe that it
is possible to have open and honest dialogue about these processes so we
can advance to women's rights.

Find common cause: We need to recognize and accept that the other
'opposition' is within our own movements. We have to find common cause in
the face of increasingly destructive forces in the world and the growth of
a backlash against women's rights.

Look at movement structure: We also need to look at our own organizations
and structures. The ngo-ization of our movements does not serve us well in
the current political moment. We cannot fight with well-managed non-profits
alone. Our professionalization, which was once part of the solution, is
increasingly part of the problem. Many of our networks have fallen into
inertia and the administrative demands of our organizations have used up
the energy we need to invest in women.

Look at the how and what: We need to look again at the how and what of our
organizing and the implications this has for our resources. We need to
begin to link strategic planning processes to an explicit analysis of power
and engage with the ideologies and socialization that prevent us from making
any headway in formal institutions.

More and better collaboration: And we need to do more collaborative
planning. For many participants working together at one session during the
meeting to answer the question 'what would we do with $20 million dollars
to strengthen progressive movements in the region?' was a new experience.
We need to create political pacts based on trust and to work with donors to
break down the hierarchies that have been created over the last ten years so
that all of us and our different ways of working are considered important in
process of transformation.

Next Steps

While the description of 'survival and resistence' captures the current
state of many women's rights organizations, there are nuances to the
situation across different regions. Latin America and the Caribbean, the
Middle East/North Africa and Central and Eastern Europe and the
Commonwealth of Independent States are the regions where cutbacks are most
frequently reported (1).

In order to be able to plan according to regional specificities, throughout
the meeting paticipants worked in regional groups to concretize their
analysis and strategies and at the end of the meeting the groups made
recommendations for follow-up strategies and next steps at a regional
level.

>From the USA and Canada to the Pacific, all the regional groups planned to
hold follow-up regional meetings to examine the questions around money and
movements in more detail. Many also recommended using existing spaces such
as the World Social Forum (WSF) to hold side meetings on funding for
women's rights work. The young feminist activists at the meeting went one
step further launching a new network 'Young Women Creating Change' which
will work to ensure that young feminists have a presence at the next WSF.

Strengthening our organizations and movements through better communication
and information sharing was another common thread. In sub-Saharan Africa,
participants plan to organize joint donor meetings to share information and
those women's rights organizations working at a global level proposed the
development of a process of feminist online learning. In South-East Asia
and the Pacific, participants recommended the development of a directory of
funding agencies and sources for the region as one way to better share
information and move away from a logic of competition to collaboration. The
women from Latin America and the Caribbean made real their commitment to
better communication actually in the meeting by singing a song 'cambia como
cambia' in the final plenary.

In some regions, participants also identified the need to develop new
organizations and spaces to strengthen our movements. In South Asia, one
recommendation was to establish a South Asian Women's Fund, the first $5
million of which will be for the development of work on violence against
women. In Europe, groups will work to create a European Feminist Forum that
will include space for work on money and movements and intergenerational
processes. And in the Middle East and North Africa, the hope is to organize
an Arab women's forum of feminist organizations.

As financial support for women's rights organizations continues to evolve
so we must continue to analyze and debate the role of money in movement
building and how the inherent power dynamics in a grantor/grantee
relationship can be managed. Perhaps the key lesson learned from the
Queretaro meeting on 'money and movements' is the importance of
articulating our theories of social change. We need continue to ask
ourselves how we envision that change happens and how we can better
articulate this to our donors so that they will fund this change. As the
women from Latin American and the Caribbean stated in the final plenary, we
need to continue to build a feminist agenda based on a political pact
between donors and women's rights organizations in all our diversity. We
need more money, better access, and on better terms and we need an
investment back into the foundations of our organizations and movements. An
investment not just in individual projects, but in women.

Notes:
(1) AWID, 'Where is the Money for Women's Rights?' Final Report: 2005.