Opinion: Gender financing must become more transparent

Research shows that feminist organizations and movements are one of the key drivers of sustained social change, especially to advance gender equality. But women’s rights, gender justice, and feminist organizations, or WROs, have been persistently under-resourced by international donors. And that problem has only been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Our analysis highlights that of all international development assistance to Kenya, Nepal, and Guatemala, donors only directed about 1% or 2% of their funding to WROs. In our new report, Making Gender Finance More Transparent, we interviewed staffers at WROs in Kenya, Nepal, and Guatemala, who noted that COVID-19 amplified these challenges. They shared the limitations of current bureaucratic processes to access new funding. These hurdles have made it incredibly difficult for them to implement a timely COVID-19 response.

Some of these organizations also expressed that COVID-19 notably changed donors’ funding priorities. Donors shifted their funding away from existing women’s rights programs to focus on new, but not necessarily gender responsive COVID-19 initiatives. One interviewee in Kenya explained that the pandemic reduced donors’ own resources forcing them to limit and prioritize projects. Another interviewee in Nepal said donors have redirected funding away from smaller, less formalized organizations to larger, government organizations.

The majority of funding these groups receive continues to be short-term and earmarked, providing little flexibility. Our research suggests that in 2018, 89% of funding to Guatemala went to short-term projects, while in Kenya it was 88% and in Nepal 54%. While the data is from a few years ago, the current situation is still bleak, if not more exacerbated by the pandemic. Without unrestricted funds, these critical and lifesaving organizations still needed to seek approval from donors during a global pandemic emergency, undermining their ability to respond to the needs of communities effectively and urgently.

These funding challenges are having ripple effects across the financial state of WROs. Many of these groups are letting go of staff — especially field staff — many of whom hold relationships with communities and movements. A number of the interviewees also said that they fear the pandemic will create a serious funding gap for women and gender equality issues in the future.

More opportunities

Yet COVID-19 still highlights opportunities for donors to more effectively support the work of feminist organizers. For instance, a representative in Guatemala mentioned some donors have been flexible with their funding. Similarly, in Nepal and Kenya, a few representatives mentioned that donors have understood and met their need to adjust their programs to be more responsive to the pandemic. A few women’s rights organizations also received additional funding from donors to respond to the gendered impacts of COVID-19. However, an interviewee in Kenya mentioned that such additional support was mostly reserved for larger organizations.

These cases highlight that some donors have identified and taken opportunities to support WROs to conduct their work in a way that is responsive to changing circumstances. When donors recognize the importance of feminist and grassroots’ actors work, they are able to increase their funding to WROs in a short amount of time. As the pandemic will likely continue to have negative impacts on women and girls, and challenge WROs’ work globally, these examples of good practices from donors must be continued in the future.

To build back better after the pandemic, we must keep engaging with and learning from women’s rights organizations. Our findings only scratch the surface of how COVID-19 has affected feminist organizing. As highlighted in our report, many WROs receive insufficient funding to sustain their operations, let alone to publicly report on their work to global databases or to other stakeholders. This suggests that insufficient funding is likely to continue to lead to scarce information on WROs’ work.

The small sample of WROs we interviewed already suggests that WROs’ experiences of COVID-19 differ widely — both within and across countries. As the pandemic persists, it is crucial that donors actively engage with them, learn from them, and most importantly, support them in their work and sharing the lessons they learn.

First, as detailed in the recent gender financing report by Publish What You Fund, donors should remove cumbersome institutional and funding barriers by providing long-term, flexible, and core support directly to women’s rights, gender justice, and feminist organizations. There are now proven examples and case studies on how to directly fund feminist groups and movements, especially in the global south. These types of trust-based funding practices will not only support their important work, but also their ability to collect, publish, analyze, and share information when relevant — allowing all stakeholders to learn and exchange on equal terms.

Second, donors must commit to engaging with WROs and feminist movements around their projects and sharing decision-making power. By increasing donors’ understanding of WROs’ needs and experiences, and by providing meaningful opportunities for feedback and collaboration, donors can learn how they can best support feminist, transformative change towards gender equality.

Finally, donors can mark their funding against relevant gender markers, such as the OECD’s gender equality policy marker. Such sector-wide transparency practices can help bring data to strengthen accountability frameworks to advance gender equality.

Women’s rights, gender justice, feminist movements and their allies have long advocated for these types of trust-based grant-making practices that are flexible, large, and unrestricted to fund transformative feminist social change. It has never been more urgent and necessary that donors normalize and actualize these demands for an ecosystem of meaningful feminist funding that truly meets the needs of those on the frontlines of change.