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20 Years of Shamefully Scarce Funding for Feminists & Women’s Rights Movements
Author - Lydia Alpízar Durán – 13 May 2015
For decades, the women’s rights movement and women’s rights
organizations have been severely underfunded. AWID research in 2010 revealed
that the median budget for 740 women’s organizations all over the globe was a
miserly US$20,000. In the same year, as a point of reference, the income for
Save the Children International and World Vision International was US$1.442
billion and US$2.611 billion respectively. This is in spite of recent research
which proves what feminists and activists have known for a long time—that
women’s movements have been the key drivers defending women’s human rights and
gender justice worldwide. As the world commemorates the 20th anniversary of the
Beijing Conference this year, creates the sustainable development goals (SDGs),
and holds the 3rd International Conference on Financing for Development, it is
critical to remember that real systemic impact for women’s rights needs
significant resources.
Lydia
Alpízar Durán is Executive Director of the Association for Women’s
Rights in Development (AWID) and is currently on the Board of Directors for the
Global Fund for Women.
20 years of shamefully scarce funding
Recent research has proven what feminists and activists have
known for a long time—women’s rights movements and organizations are key
drivers for creating change to advance, sustain and defend women’s human rights
and gender justice worldwide (Htun and Weldon 2012). The Fourth World
Conference on Women held in Beijing, China was a key catalyst towards this. In
Beijing, governments had signed the most visionary global agreement ever
achieved in this field, and women who participated in the conference went home
equipped with a new set of agreements they could use to drive change in their
communities. Financial commitments however, were not as strongly negotiated and
secured, which further down the line had significant repercussions for the work
of women’s rights organizations and the actual realization of the agreements
made in Beijing in 1995.
On the upside, the word ‘Beijing’ in many countries became associated with a
crop of highly visible and dynamic women’s rights activists determined to work
toward the full empowerment of women. Many of these activists started
organizations that built on the work of existing feminists and women’s rights
organizations, and joined movements for gender justice. Initially, the
post-Beijing era saw some important resources allocated towards processes that
would translate the Beijing Declaration into concrete change on the ground.
This was critical in order to hold governments accountable to commitments made,
and transform promises into concrete policies, programmes and budget
allocations. Yet the resources available to support the crucial work carried
out by women’s rights groups did not last long and did not benefit most women’s
rights groups. Resources started to shrink at the beginning of the 2000s and
more and more groups (both existing and new) that had grown in the post-Beijing
era found themselves facing major funding challenges, closing programmes,
having to let staff go and reducing the scope of their work. A common comment
made repeatedly by women’s rights groups at the time was: ‘Where can we get
funding to support our work? Previously existing sources are no longer
there…’
How much funding is available for women’s rights
organizations?
In 2005, AWID started an action based research project to track
‘Where is the Money for Women’s Rights?’ This was based on the need to learn
more about the financial situation that women’s rights organizations now found
themselves in, and to identify ways in which this financial crisis could be
resolved. The information and data gathered through this 2005 research was
strikingly clear: at the time, the average annual budget of women’s rights
organizations was just US$10,000 a year; the number of large women’s rights
organizations with budgets over US$500,000 had declined significantly; and most
groups were severely underfunded and were subsidizing the crucial interventions
their organizations were engaged in. Women’s rights organizations could be
described as being in a state of survival and resistance. During this same
period there were also some worrying trends in the donor community. Several
donor agencies had significantly cut or closed down their gender or women’s
rights programmes. The negative impact of gender mainstreaming was
tangible—existing programmes and budgets were in many cases mainstreamed into
oblivion! Also some within the donor community had the impression that women’s
rights and gender justice work had achieved its goals and was no longer
necessary, or that it was already receiving sufficient resources and was
therefore no longer a key priority. This misperception impacted the actual
amount of resources being disbursed for gender justice and women’s rights at
large, but in particular the amounts which were distributed to support feminist
and women’s rights organizations.
Advocacy based on our research results undertaken after 2006 by many women’s
rights organizations and women’s funds, as well as donor allies, resulted in
increases in resources in some donor agencies, with the creation of new funds
in some cases or a renewed commitment to fund women’s rights organizing and
gender justice more broadly. But this increase in resources did not last long
and only in a few cases was sustained funding a reality. Simultaneously, there
were major changes affecting different parts of the donor community resulting
in an instrumentalist approach to gender equality, a narrow focus on the
measurement of change, whilst simultaneously demanding increased capacity. This
affected the quantity and quality of resources available (such as increasing
donor preference for project funding versus core funding, short-term funding
versus long-term funding and the imposition of narrow and simplistic monitoring
and evaluation frameworks to monitor and assess impact).
Financial
crisis results in funding cuts for women’s organizations
In 2008, the financial recession in the North and attendant global
systemic crisis severely hit the already under-funded women’s rights movement.
Budgets allocated for overseas development assistance were slashed in many
cases, and conservative voices in Northern governments argued for the severe
reduction of funding for international development. Significant cuts in funding
for women’s rights were also made in other funding sectors, including
foundations, women’s funds, INGOs and individual philanthropists. In 2010, AWID
conducted a global survey of women’s organizations in five languages with over
1,100 responses from 140 countries. 740 organizations that took part in the
survey provided budgetary information. The results showed that the combined
income of these organizations for 2010 was close to US$106 million. In the same
year, the income for Save the Children International and World Vision
International was US$1.442 billion and US$2.611 billion respectively. However
funding limitations for women’s rights organizations meant that organizations
remained small, with many programmes being cut combined with the attendant
staff losses. Women’s rights organizations consistently reported receiving
funding for specific projects rather than long term flexible funding. 48% of
the organizations that AWID polled in 2011 had never received core funding
(invaluable funding needed for the administration of an organization), and 52%
had never benefited from multi-year funding (that ensures the sustainable and
uninterrupted strategic work of organizations). Women’s rights organizations
responded to the crisis in funding by seeking to become more self-reliant
through a variety of income generation activities such as membership fees.
Image
courtesy of AWID
Even in the midst of tough economic times, women’s rights activists have
advocated for increased resources for the work they do, and some of this effort
has reaped results. The 2008 to 2011 period saw a significant increase in
resources given to women’s organizations in the Netherlands, Norway, Spain,
Sweden and the U.K.– although the amount remains a drop in the ocean of total
development aid. The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women has provided
US$95 million to 368 initiatives in 132 countries and has been an important
source of support for women’s rights work. The Millenium Development Goal
(MDG)3 Fund by the Dutch government released unprecedented
funding for gender justice work—€82 million was disbursed to 45 organizations,
mainly women’s rights organizations. This was the largest single fund ever
created for gender equality, targeting women’s rights and civil society
organizations.
In more recent times, the women’s rights funding landscape has seen the entry
of new actors and new money. This takes the form of increased public private
partnerships, a rise in the number of wealthy philanthropists supporting
development work, expanded corporate social responsibility and corporate
philanthropy programmes and an interest from new foundations and existing
foundations in ‘women and girls’. These new actors tend to prioritize ‘economic
growth’ and ‘return on investment’ rather than a rights-based perspective.There
is then a danger that the agenda being shaped by these parties will not be
framed on the centrality of human rights and wellbeing—unless feminists and
women’s rights organizations work to influence these new actors.
7
crucial issues for funding to ensure women’s rights
As the world commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Beijing
Conference, creates the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and holds the
Third International Conference on Financing for Development, it is critical to
remember that real systemic impact for women’s rights requires the following:
1.
Ensuring sufficient and diverse resources to design, implement,
monitor and evaluate relevant public policies and to support civil society
organizations, particularly feminist and women’s rights organizations, as key
champions working on the ground and at all crucial levels.
2.
Diversification of resources to support women’s rights and
gender justice does not mean that we are letting governments (all of them, from
North and South) off the hook. Domestic resources, overseas development aid and
other forms of governmental and intergovernmental financing are crucial to
achieve women’s rights and gender justice in the long run.
3.
Building collective responsibility for resource mobilization to
advance women’s rights and gender justice, and particularly, for resources to
support women’s rights organizing, based on a vision that work to advance
women’s rights deserves all the resources that are needed and available in a
world where so many resources are ill-invested elsewhere, and not a logic of
scarcity and competition.
4.
Understanding the political nature of money and resource
allocation. Governments and other powerful actors may speak a lot of their
commitment to gender justice and women’s rights, but unless that is supported
by all the resources needed to make their commitments a reality and advance
much needed transformations, the political will and real commitment is simply
not there.
5.
Supporting initiatives that go beyond just empowering individual
women or only simplistic magic-bullet solutions for what are clearly deeply
rooted structural problems in need of integrated or comprehensive approaches
and strategies. Resources given to support women’s rights organizations, in all
their diversity, need to be flexible, responsive, and long term. This needs to
include support for core work, capacity building, leadership development, and
movement building.
6.
Recognizing the diverse forms of women’s rights organizing, and
the inequality of access to resources that exist given the intersecting
oppressions that women face. This means ensuring that resources are made
available to different types of organizations and women’s rights groups and
people working for gender justice, so that regardless of their ethnicity,
sexual orientation, gender identity, age, class, race, ability, marital status,
health status, nationality, refugee status, among other categories, all groups
are benefiting from access to resources in the conditions they need to
strengthen their capacity to advocate for their rights.
7.
Resources should be made available to support feminist and
women’s rights organizations in ALL countries, in ALL regions of the world,
recognizing the inequalities amongst them. I focus on ALL because I believe
that the only way to make transformatory change happen for women and girls
around the world, to achieve gender justice in the long run, is to have strong
organizations and movements as key drivers and defenders of these agendas
everywhere. Current world challenges are global in nature and need to be
tackled in every country and at the global level, so that the gains achieved
are not lost, but can be sustained and advanced. Through international
solidarity we support each other in our struggles to protect, defend and
advance women’s rights and gender justice worldwide.
How
mountains can be moved
The impact of the Dutch MDG3 fund (a huge exception to how
funding for women’s rights is typically provided) is a powerful example of how
mountains can be moved when women’s organizations are supported in strategic
ways. Overall, initiatives supported by this fund reached 165 countries on 7
continents with results including over 224 million women gaining a new
awareness of women’s rights; 105,305 organizations being strengthened and
provided with increased capacity and tools to work effectively; and national
governments of 46 countries influenced to strengthen their national gender
justice policies and programmes. We need more of the kind of work the MDG3 fund
has enabled if the world is serious about funding women’s rights work, and
advancing gender justice.
REFERENCES
Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon. 2012. “The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy
Change: Combating Violence against Women in Global Perspective, 1975–2005”.American Political Science
Review 106:548-569.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Lydia Alpízar Durán is a Costa Rican/Mexican feminist activist
based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She has been Executive Director of the Association
for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) since 2007, and was the manager of
AWID’s Where is the Money for Women’s Rights? and Building Feminist Movements
and Organizations Strategic Initiatives from 2003-2006. Lydia is a sociologist
by training and co-founder and advisor of ELIGE - Youth Network for
Reproductive and Sexual Rights (Mexico). She was a member of the International
Council for Human Rights Policy (2004-2011). She is currently on the Board of
Directors for the Global Fund for Women. She is a graduate of the Human Rights
Advocacy Training Program at the Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia
University, New York City. Lydia has extensive experience in advocacy and
training on women's human rights, particularly in sexual rights and
reproductive rights, financing for gender equality and women’s rights
organizing, and violence against women.