“Radically Necessary” – Building A Feminist Future Through Flexible Funding 

In 2024, Womankind began a 2-year core funding pilot with 24 partners across Africa and South Asia. Strategic Partner Support Grants intended to provide completely flexible funding to historically excluded and marginalised groups so that they could work flexibly and strategically according to their needs and local contexts. 

A lot has changed since we began the pilot. Women’s rights organisations and feminist movements face increasing clampdowns on civic space, rising anti-gender backlash and ongoing rights rollbacks. Historical allies in the struggle for gender justice have slashed aid budgets, threatening decades of progress on gender equality.  

A funding stream that was intended to increase partner’s financial resilience and support the realisation of their long-term strategies began to look like a very small patch over a widening resource gap.  

But time and time again, we heard from partners about how important core funding was in allowing them to respond flexibly to the challenging context and evolving needs of their communities.  

Here are 4 ways that flexible funding is making a difference for women’s rights organisations:  

Filling critical gaps left by funding cuts

The sudden withdrawal of USAID and reduction in official overseas development assistance (ODA) has left critical gaps and threatened essential services, from preventing violence against women to ensuring sexual and reproductive health rights. While funding from Womankind does not replace what was lost, partners have used it to ensure continuity of essential services, fill gaps or bridge through delays between funding cycles, and cover the costs associated with increased demand, inflation and currency volatility. 

“A flexible grant allows us to respond quickly and effectively to urgent needs, such as emergency advocacy, supporting community members and addressing emergency health needs within the community. The flexibility ensures that we can adapt to unforeseen challenges and provide timely support where it is most needed, strengthening our ability to protect and empower gender and sexual minorities. This adaptability is crucial for meeting the immediate and evolving needs of the community we serve.”  – Sarita KC, Executive Director, Mitini Nepal

Enabling Responsiveness

From supporting women in conflict zones to providing emergency grants to survivors of gender-based violence, flexible funding ensures that women’s rights organisations can respond to contextual changes and strategic opportunities with agility. Partners used strategic grants to ensure women facing violence could access essential support such as relocation and temporary housing, urgent medical treatment, trauma counselling and reproductive healthcare. It also allows partner organisations to take advantage of emerging opportunities, for example to carry out advocacy or forge new partnerships. 

“The grant gave us the flexibility to respond strategically to urgent political threats, such as the reintroduction of the Sexual Offenses Bill. This kind of agility is rare and crucial. It reinforced our ability to plan, pivot, and lead advocacy efforts rooted in LBQ womxn’s lived realities.”  – Gloria Mutyaba, Freedom and Roam (FARUG), Uganda

“For the women and communities, we work with, this flexibility translates into more inclusive, timely, and relevant support. It enables us to adapt our programs to their real-life circumstances and needs, rather than trying to fit those needs into pre-set funding boxes” (Jane Kihungi, Director Women Challenged to Challenge, WCC, Kenya) 

Resourcing new and innovative approaches.

Flexible funding allows WROs and feminist movements to develop new programmes and approaches in response to community needs. For example, Womankind partners in both Zimbabwe and Nepal used their strategic grant to pilot programmes providing seed funding to women for the development of community businesses tailored to local resources and needs. This proved to be a successful model for improving women’s economic resilience and financial autonomy, while also serving as a gateway to bringing marginalised communities into the broader women’s movement. 

“Flexible grants significantly enhance our autonomy, enabling WCoZ to make informed decisions about resource allocation based on the evolving conditions in our operating environment. This adaptability allows us to respond swiftly to changing economic and political landscapes, ensuring our initiatives remain relevant and effective.” – Mercy Jaravani, National Coordinator, Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe (WCoZ)

Enabling space to dream, rest and care for ourselves and our communities

In a world increasingly hostile to feminist values, collective care and wellbeing often go by the wayside. Strategic grants enabled partners to come together to plan, strategise and re-think their work in the face of volatile contexts and scarcity of resources. It also enabled them to prioritise self and collective care through counselling, teambuilding, and healing activities aimed to ensure staff and community members can stay grounded, build resilience and develop tools and coping mechanisms for the difficult road ahead.  

“Flexible funding like that from Womankind is not just supportive, it is radically necessary. In a world that often demands we flatten our work into outputs and logframes, this kind of funding dares to trust our knowledge. It meets us where we are, holds space for what we carry, and stretches to match the complexity of feminist and queer organising” – Muthoni Ngige, Direcor, Minority Womyn in Action, Kenya 

Flexible funding is not a panacea. There is no denying the scale and gravity of the challenges we face. But feminist movements have the knowledge, creativity and resilience needed to bring about change. Long-term, flexible and trust-based funding is essential to realising their ambitions and building a feminist future where all women, girls and people of all genders live with joy, choice and dignity.