Until 2000, Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi received funding requests she could do nothing about. Now, she and the African Women’s Development Fund are transforming Africa’s grant-making landscape and helping women take development into their own hands.
Adeleye-Fayemi believes in advancing development “grounded in ownership”, a philosophy which resonates throughout AWDF. She co-founded AWDF in 2000 with Joanna Foster of Ghana and Hilda Tardia of Uganda six years after meeting at a forum in Dakar, Senegal.
“We thought that it would not be a bad idea to provide resources to a lot of the women’s organizations who we thought were doing cutting edge work on the continent, especially young women,” Adeleye-Fayemi, who now serves as AWDF’s executive director, told Devex.
Drawing on their professional networks in the donor sphere, the trio secured seed money from institutions like the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. Today, AWDF calls itself the “first Africa-wide grant-making fund.”
A Nigerian and British national, Adeleye-Fayemi obtained her undergraduate and graduate degrees in history from the University of Ife, Nigeria, and later returned to England, her land of birth, for a masters degree in gender and society. She set up the African Women’s Leadership Institute while directing Akina Mama wa Afrika, a U.K.-based development organization, from 1991 to 2001. She then led the Association for Women’s Rights in Development from 2003 to 2005.
A decade after its establishment, AWDF has provided $14 million in grants to more than 1,000 women’s groups across 46 African nations.
Access to funds remains a roadblock in advancing women’s rights and development, Abeleye-Fayemi told Devex in a far-reaching conversation on grant-making trends in Africa and fundraising strategies for small and medium-sized groups.
Grant-making trends in Africa
This year, AWDF is celebrating its 10th anniversary of grant-making in Africa. What are some of the major trends you’re seeing in the industry? In your opinion, what are the key challenges and opportunities for grant-making in Africa?
Well, the trends that we’re seeing now are both positive and challenging. The challenging trends are to do with the fact that we are in the midst of a global economic crisis, and so a lot of the traditional sources who have provided resources for social change programs or development work on the African continent are either cutting down, drying up altogether or shifting focus. And so we have the large private corporations for example, some of them have lost significant portions of their endowments. A lot of the countries who give development assistance through bilateral aid are either cutting down or shifting focus. And so it’s difficult to sustain or scale up a lot of the good work that civil society organizations are doing especially around economic empowerment and social justice issues, peace-building efforts, access to political participation and a whole range of other issues.
The good news, though, is that when it comes to the issue of women and girls, there seems to be a moment now where people are willing to listen to how important it is to invest in women and girls. And how, when you do that, when you invest in women and girls, the return on your investment is not about the life of the one woman or the one girl who has been affected, but it’s about healthier families, healthier communities, healthier countries and revitalized communities all round. And so, we have a lot of people now coming to the table. We have a lot of individual philanthropists, we have a lot of entrepreneurs who have made quite a lot of money and who are now thinking about how they can put those resources to good use in development, and who think that investing in programs that can raise the status of women and girls is the way to go. So that moment creates opportunities for organizations like AWDF to develop new partnerships and leverage additional resources to continue the work that we’re doing.
Can you give us concrete examples of how AWDF’s grants have helped spur economic development and women’s rights?
I can give you an example of a coalition that was set up in Ghana a couple of years ago to pass a bill on domestic violence through the Ghanaian parliament, and the coalition was called the Coalition on the Domestic Violence Bill. And three years ago the domestic violence bill was passed after intense advocacy, mobilization, research and coordination efforts by the people in the coalition. We provided funding for the coalition over a period of three to four years and we were extremely pleased when the bill was passed. But passing a bill is not the end of the story. Then, you have to ensure that in terms of its day to day implementation, it being something in the lives of ordinary Ghanaian women. So we’re also involved in following up processes that would test the bill. So right now we’re also funding a test case on the domestic violence bill, a case of a woman who’s going through the system to try and challenge a personal violation. So we’re trying to stick with the process to make sure it does mean something.
And I can give you an example of a group that we have funded in, let me see now, in South Africa, Positive Women’s Network. They do a lot of work ranging from service delivery, supporting women who are living positively with HIV/AIDS, to advocacy around violence against women and women’s access to treatment and services and care and so on. And they have done extremely good work. They have support groups in many parts of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Soweto. And that organization has become a lifeline to a lot of, especially young women in those communities living with HIV/AIDS and who need support to have a better quality of life.
Winning an AWDF grant
Could you run us through the grant-making process? How do people get to participate and how do you eventually select the groups you fund?
People apply, they send application forms. We have applications that are available in English and French. People can send us proposals in Portuguese or Arabic, we’ll have them translated, but our two main working languages are English and French. And the grants are assessed using different criteria. The organizations have to be registered organizations, they have to be led by women, they have to show some track record of having done some work in their community. They don’t have to have been funded by any other donor. As a matter of fact, quite a lot of the grantees we’ve supported have not been funded by a former donor before, they’ve only been able to mobilize resources from amongst themselves. So we look at all those things and we look at the ability to absorb funding and the ability to account, to manage the project and account for the project.
We have a range of organizations that we support so we have different levels of sophistication in terms of the kinds of grantees that we work with. Some are very small groups, we actually have a small grants program through which we deal with groups in rural areas who are not able to put a formal proposal together but have very good work that they’re doing. So the due diligence that is performed on those groups in the small grants program is different from the main grants program. In the main grants program we have organizations who are pretty well-established and who have been funded by other donors and need our funding to be able to develop a new piece of work or to scale up the work that they are doing.
When we look at the proposals and we think that it’s something that we’d like to support, the grants department at AWDF screens them and then submits them to the programs committee of the board for recommendation. There are some grants that are decided at the level of the executive director’s office, grants of $20,000 and below. Grants of $20,000 and above go to the programs committee of the board for a decision. We give grants ranging up to $50,000 for one year and we can also give grants – in some cases, we can give multi-year grants for up to $120,000. And so once the grants have been approved by the board, the grantees are notified and the process of grants management starts. And some time during the life of any project we make sure we visit the grantees, either before the project starts or during the life of the project.
Which sectors have generally received the most funds and which sectors are you looking to give more funds to? There is a lot of talk about climate change and energy, are you looking to do any funding in those areas?
Yes we will. Those are some of the areas we will now be looking at, linked to our economic empowerment program. Most of our funding has traditionally gone to work around women’s human rights and economic empowerment, and also political participation. Those are the top three. We would like to do more in funding work around sexual health and reproductive rights. We’ve also done a lot of grant-making in HIV/AIDS, where we set up a special HIV/AIDS fund in 2005. So we’d like to do more work around women’s sexual and reproductive rights, and we’re going to be doing funding around climate change and food security, and that will be linked to, as I said, our economic empowerment program.
How can prospective grantees standout in applying for grants? Are there specific elements you seek in a potential grantee or application? How can these organizations get in touch with AWDF?
Actually for AWDF it is less about the application process, it is more about how the organization is perceived in its community, what value it’s adding and what kind of leadership role it’s playing. We try to get behind the applications and, you know, statistics that people are sending us and the nice pros they put into proposals. We are a fund that is committed to strengthening the women’s movement, so we feel it is important to engage with the leaders, the faces behind the organizations. And it’s through that engagement that these proposals or applications emerge.
Who are AWDF’s key partners? Can you give some concrete examples of these partnerships and how they were started? Do you outsource any of your operations to other organizations or companies?
Well, we have quite a wide range of donors in the U.S., in Europe and on the African continent. I’m hesitant to start giving you a full list in case I leave someone out. But I’ve mentioned some of our funders to you, like the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corp. in the early days, and MacArthur. We also have organizations such as the Nuffield Foundation. We have some anonymous donors through philanthropic advisors, the Global Fund for Women, the Soros Foundation. And in Europe, we have funding from quite a number of European governments like the Danish government, the Dutch government, the Norwegian government, and in the U.K. we have funding from large donors such as Comic Relief. On the continent we get funding from the African Capacity Building Foundation, which is a grant-making initiative set up by the World Bank, and a whole range of others. I don’t want to leave people out but that’s an overview of some of the donors that have supported our work.
In terms of outsourcing, we are a small organization – well, in nonprofit terms, we’re pretty large – so we try to do most of our work either using our staff or using consultants. We also have a pool of regional advisors across the continent who help support the monitoring and evaluation and due diligence with grantees in different places.
How do potential partners contact you?
They check the Web site and get in touch with us.
Looking back, and ahead: Raising funds and awareness
What is AWDF excited about and what are your goals for 2010 and beyond?
We are excited that we have been able to stay true to our founding mission, which is to provide resources for the African women’s movement. We have provided those resources through grant-making, through capacity building, and through movement-building initiatives. We’re very excited about that.
And for 2010, we think we would like to celebrate the achievements of our grantee partners. It’s more about them. Of course, we would like to celebrate the fact that we have been around for 10 years and we’ve done a significant amount of work, but we’d like to celebrate the achievements of our grantee partners who, on a day-to-day basis, are doing a lot of work in their communities to change women’s lives and to raise the status of women, and some of them do so under life-threatening circumstances.
You mention that a lot of organizations find it challenging to raise funds in the ongoing economic crisis. Given your experience, what would you say small African organizations should be doing? Where should they be looking for their funding? And what kind of skills and capacity should they be building in order to position themselves?
I think it’s important for organizations to diversify their sources of income. You need to do an analysis of where your funding is coming from, and if more than 50 to 60 percent of your funding is coming from one source, then you need to think about what will happen to your work or to your mission if that significant chunk of your project was no longer there.
A lot of organizations receive their funding, usually from, you know, foundations or from funding institutions. But we also need to be able to develop the capacity to diversify our income streams into looking at individuals, into looking at corporate philanthropy, and if we are so inclined, to also looking into investments. There are investments in real estate, you can look into stocks and shares, and also social enterprises. At AWDF, for example, we have an endowment fund which we have been building up for the past three years or so, and we have investments in real estate in Accra, Ghana, and on the money market. And we also have quite a lot of individual donors who support our work within Africa and outside of Africa, and this is something that we are going to be working on intensely over the next couple of years.
Having participated in the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women, in your opinion, what are the key successes and challenges for gender and development and what recommendations do you have for moving forward?
In terms of the successes, it’s obvious that the women’s movement, over the past 15 years, or even before then, but especially in the past 15 years, we have recorded significant successes in raising awareness around the rights of women. People no longer ask the stupid question, “What do women want?” Now people know that women want economic empowerment, that women want to live their lives free of violence, now people know that women want economic and social justice, and now people know that women want control over their bodies. So we’ve been able to raise awareness about the rights of women, we’ve been able to achieve a broad framework of policies and covenants and instruments and protocols which are meant to guarantee the rights of women, guarantee the promotion, the protection of the rights of women.
You have the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW. There’s the Beijing platform for action. On the African continent we have the African Protocol on Women’s Rights, there’s also the U.N. resolution 1325 on women, which addresses the roles of women in conflict situations and peace-building.
So there’s a broad range of frameworks which should be able to guide governments and policymakers and all those responsible for making these processes work, as to what it is that needs to be done to raise the status of women. Those policy frameworks are very clear, they provide a whole range of opportunities for the game to be changed. So those are the key successes that, if you go around all the panels at the CSW, those are the key successes that you will hear, over and over. The main challenge has been lack of political will, lack of serious implementation of these frameworks and inadequate resources, inadequate financial, material and technical resources.
And so the way round these difficulties is to intensify our advocacy efforts with our governments, with global institutions and with, you know, our local opinion leaders, and to demand for accountability.
What makes a successful career in gender and development? Read more from our interview with Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi.
