Introduction
Women’s organisations and movements have historically been key actors
in the advancement of women’s rights, gender equality, social justice
and development. Nevertheless, this important role has been threatened
by the growing challenges to obtain resources that support this work.
The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) has become
aware of these challenges and has seen that the dominant sense is one of
scarcity: too few interested funders, with too little money to support
existing women's rights initiatives. Is this really the case? Is it
that women's rights groups are not bold enough in their fundraising
strategies? Is it that donors simply don't understand the urgency and
importance of this work?
AWID set out to answer these and other questions in 2004 when we
launched the multi-year action-research initiative "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 for feminist movement and women's rights organisations.
What we have since learned is that the challenges of the current
funding landscape are many; including what seems to be decreasing support
for women's rights organisations among almost all sectors of funders in
most regions.
Our findings point to the need to completely re-think the relationship
between money and movements. A focus on individual organisational
survival — while understandable in times of crisis — contributes to
fragmentation and weakened movements. We must find alternative, more
collective ways of approaching resource mobilisation that both expand
the pool of resources for women’s organisations generally, and
strategically influence donor agendas.
In this edition we specially focus on information and communication
technologies (ICT) and gender, taking a closer look at the women’s
organisations working on this area that responded to our 2006 survey.
In addition we include some highlights of an interview conducted with
Ms. Sonia Jorge, a specialist in Communications Policy and Regulation
working on Gender and Development. Her valuable inputs not only reflect
what we have observed in past researches but also contribute to a better
understanding of funding trends, women’s organisations, ICT and gender.
Women's Rights Organisations Working on ICT
Based on AWID’s most recent survey results (2006), of the 958 women’s
organisations which responded, only 161 mentioned to work on ICT, accounting
for 17% of the sample.
The regional distribution of these organisations is as follows: 43%
based in Africa, 12% based in Asia, 19% based in Latin America and the
Caribbean, 6% in the Middle East and North of Africa, 16% in
Central/Eastern Europe and 4% in North America and Western Europe. Only
one organisation did not identify the region it belongs to (region
unknown). The graph below illustrates these percentages:
Within that particular group, two-thirds of the organisations had
annual budgets of less than USD 50,000 in 2005, as it is shown in the
following graph:
The role that civil society organisations, particularly women’s
organisations, play within the information society is crucial to a
sustainable long term development. Following Nancy Hafkin and Sophia
Huyer’s 2007 report, "everyone will benefit if women engage in and
actively contribute to the knowledge society. If they do not, society
will be deprived of their full creativity, perspective and experience,
and women will not be able to play a role in designing, creating and
developing science and technology (S&T) that affects every aspect
of their lives and determines their life opportunities" [1].
The data presented clearly shows that women’s organisations working on
ICT live and work with limited resources. Even if this may seem as a
rather discouraging landscape, there has been an apparent improvement
in the last ten years: in 1995 81% of the organisations working on ICT
had budgets under USD 50,000, and in 2000 this percentage was of 74%.
If their impact is to be expanded and the benefits of ICT to women and
their communities are to be enhanced, committed efforts from key actors
to effectively include and integrate gender equality in policy making
is urgent for ensuring that resources will be available for women’s
organisations.
On the other hand, half of these organisations declared that it is more
difficult to raise funds now than 5 years ago, while only 25% said that
it is either easy or stayed the same. In addition, 32 organisations
said they didn’t exist in the year 2000, which shows how young the
women’s rights organisations working on ICT are. Consequently, many of
these organisations are in an early stage of development, a critical
aspect that needs to be ameliorated through funding in order to ensure
equal access for women and men to the ICT. There is also a need to
elaborate clear and effective guidelines on how to engender ICT
policies, which entails, as Sonia Jorge underlined, professional
expertise in both gender and ICT to address the technical aspects of
ICT/telecom policy and women’s organisation. Gender advocates need to
be engaged with universal access policy and ensure that those funds are
used to support access to and use of ICT by women.
Who Funds Women's Work on ICT?
According to the whole sample of our survey respondents, the most
important sources of funding in financial terms for 2005 were bilateral
and multilateral assistance (23% of total revenues), international
non-governmental organisations (14%) and large private foundations
(13%).
However it is important to also note the role played by women’s funds.
While they accounted for just 5% of total revenue in 2005, 46% of
survey respondents reported receiving support from these funds. Women’s
funds are thus playing a critical role in reaching an enormous range of
groups, in a sense broadening access to resources.
Regarding specific donors, the most important for 2005 as reported by
the survey respondents included individual donors, the Dutch
Government, the Ford Foundation, Oxfam International members, the
Global Fund for Women and HIVOS.
Looking particularly at the 161 women’s organisations working on ICT,
the 15 donors that provided the biggest support in 2005 were:
- Global Fund for
human rights
- Toyota Foundation
- Danish official
aid
- Local
foundations
- European
Commission/EU
- HIVOS
- Your national or
local government
- Heinrich Boll
Foundation
- Dutch Government
- Norwegian
Government
- CIDA (Canadian
official aid)
- United Nations
Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
- Global Fund for
Women
- CAFOD (Catholic
Agency for Overseas Development)
- Oxfam
International Members
Once again, the bilateral and multilateral agencies
represent a big part of the funding available for this work. Women’s
organisations should therefore be working to continue to showcase all
the successful projects they have developed and make the case for
further support, not only by governments or multilateral organisms, but
also from other types of donors.
An Alternative Vision for Resource Mobilisation
As we identify current and potential sources of funding for women’s
organisations, it is important to step back and reflect on the broader
significance of money in our movements. Without a doubt, the
relationship has been a complicated one. While funding has facilitated
many of our important achievements, it has also had unwanted impacts on
our agendas, contributed to competition and fragmentation and has been
seen as a ‘co-opting’ force. Money has rarely been the subject of open
discussion; either for fear of appearing motivated for the wrong
reasons, or for fear that sharing too much information will lead to
another organisation’s gain and our loss. We must challenge this
relationship between money and women’s movements. Our capacity to
engage with donors is political, not just in resourcing our work, but
in influencing funding agendas and priorities.
If we want to expand the pool of resources available for women’s
organisations in all their valuable diversity, as well as ensure that
donor priorities are more closely aligned to our own, we must change
the way we approach resource mobilisation. This means moving away from
traditional fundraising models where individual organisations reach out
to individual donor agencies. It means including resource mobilisation
as part of collective strategies where women’s organisations come
together to influence broad funding sectors and trends, guided by
shared strategic goals. This kind of strategy demands solidarity; we
cannot rest if our organisation is well off financially while others
are struggling. This is about the financial sustainability for our
movements.
Women’s rights organisations must explore new approaches to resource
mobilisation and financial sustainability that:
- Build collective
power:
How do we build shared political agendas that recognise our
diverse political projects? A revitalised ethos of solidarity is
urgently needed, to bridge the fragmentation that has weakened
women’s movements around the world. Key elements are to:
collectively clarify ideology, values and ‘non-negotiables’; widen
the base of the movement and ‘popularise’ feminism; claim more
platforms for coalition-building, collective reflection and
analysis; identify priorities through genuinely democratic
regional processes; design creative ways to share assets (legal
and financial specialists, fundraisers, office space, funding for
meetings, information on donors, communication technologies, etc).
- Engage with
donor allies: Donor agencies are not monoliths. On the inside
are individuals with different interests and priorities. Seek out
allies within the agencies, put proactive strategies on the table
and negotiate terms of engagement, and support internal champions
to influence their funding institution.
- Create more
autonomous funding to sustain our movements: there are many
well-founded critiques of the impact that donor funding has had on
political agendas of women’s movements. Membership fees,
investment in long term assets, innovative experiments with a
‘solidarity economy’ are some of the strategies women’s
organisations are using to develop more autonomous funding
sources.
- Develop and
support leaders: strong, vibrant feminist leadership is critical
for propelling our agendas. Processes to build and strengthen
multigenerational leadership are critical, as are efforts to build
feminist leadership among grassroots and community organisations
that ground women’s rights work.
[1]
Engendering the knowledge society: measuring women’s participation.
Published by Orbicom in association with NRC Press Canada Institute for
Scientific and Technical Information, 2007
Lucía Carrasco, Fernanda Hopenhaym and Cindy Clark are each
respectively, the Programme Assistant, Associate Researcher and Manager
of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), Where is
the money for women's right? Strategic initiative.
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