Womankind Worldwide launches strategic partnership with the Government of the Netherlands

Womankind launches €10 million AWESOME advocacy programme through the Strengthening Civil Society Power of Women Partnership Fund

We are delighted to announce that in January 2021 we began the inception phase of a 5 year, €10 million advocacy programme to support women’s movements in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda to be strengthened, less fragmented and more representative of diverse groups of women, including women with disabilities.

Despite the challenges of co-creating this innovative programme in the midst of a global pandemic, together with our partners we devised and designed the programme called Advancing Women’s Engagement: Strengthening Opportunities to Mobilise for Equality (AWESOME).

AWESOME brings together seven women’s rights organisations sharing the same values and vision for women’s rights, equality and feminist principles yet with diverse approaches and constituencies:

1. Ethiopia: Siiqqee Women’s Development Association (SWDA)
2. Ethiopia: Ethiopian Women with Disabilities National Association (EWDNA)
3. Kenya: Federation of Women Lawyers, Kenya (FIDA-Kenya)
4. Kenya: Women Challenged to Challenge (WCC)
5. Uganda: Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE)
6. Uganda: National Union of Women with Disabilities of Uganda (NUWODU)
7. United Kingdom: Womankind Worldwide

The AWESOME Consortium purposefully includes a mainstream women’s rights organisation (WRO) in each country (each with a different area of expertise relating to policy and advocacy and position within the women’s movement covering access to justice, finance and budgeting, and women’s economic rights respectively) combined with a disabled women’s rights organisation (DWRO).

The core objective of AWESOME is to strengthen the capacity and solidarity among WROs and DWROs to collectively challenge the unequal power relations that exist and perpetuate the cycle of poverty and gender inequality. AWESOME focuses on two themes including sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and women’s participation and leadership (WPL) including political leadership and works at three levels:

• Self – to provide safe spaces for women’s rights organisations (WROs) including those led by women with disabilities, activists and young women to come together to increase collaboration and solidarity:

This includes safe and inclusive spaces for different groups of women to come together, address existing power imbalances within the women’s movement itself and to develop and agree a common agenda for advocacy and influencing that is informed by issues affecting different diverse women and their constituencies. In addition to national and local level spaces in different countries, multi-country online and offline spaces will be created that will bring together project partners from the three countries to meet, exchange ideas, learn together and from each other and build solidarity.

• Society – to ensure greater willingness and support to challenge harmful gender norms and attitudes:

Working with societal actors and key influencers at community level including religious and traditional leaders, elders, law enforcement officials, the formal and informal justice sectors, and the media in each country, we aim to change the conversation around how women and girls are perceived. We will challenge stigma and discrimination against women, in particular women with disabilities seeking access to justice and access to leadership positions. We will engage men and boys to promote positive masculinities and transformative change at community level, creating a critical mass of change agents to shift the narrative around women’s rights and disabled women’s rights.

• Formal institutions – to improve the policy and legal framework for the realisation of women’s rights:

Our focus is on state actors to seek change at numerous levels including agenda setting, framing of the issues, procedural change as well as law and policy change, recognising the different contexts in which we are working. We will advocate for gender transformative and inclusive amendments that specifically address and accommodate the needs of women with disabilities. As part of the process of advocating for law reforms at the country levels, we will use international instruments as a standard especially where the three countries have ratified/endorsed them by lobbying for effective changes to a number of different laws and policies to align with key international conventions and agreements.

We are busy with the inception phase at present including the creation of a communications plan with AWESOME partners. We will provide updates and share more insights soon.