What have we learnt in six years of feminist grant making?
By Womankind Worldwide
Womankind believes that flexible funding strengthens women’s rights organisations and feminist movements. For the last 20 years, we have been advocating with donors to give flexible funding for gender equality so that women’s rights organisations can focus on doing the work they have defined that drives impact and can adapt easily to shifts in their context.
We continue to advocate for flexible funding, but in 2019 we also took the bold decision to create our own flexible funding schemes to channel high quality feminist funding to our partners. In doing this we have learnt from and are grateful to other feminist funders who have led the way – including Mama Cash, African Women’s Development Fund, Global Fund for Women and Foundation for a Just Society.
What have we learned?
Coordination is Key
While each of our flexible funds has a dedicated Fund Manager, it’s essential that we meet regularly to plan our grant cycles, align our processes and share learning. This helps ensure clarity and reduce the administrative burden on partners – making our funding more accessible.
Integrate Feedback
In 2024, Womankind organised our first Flexible Funding Convening in Kenya. The convening brought together grantees of all three funds based in Kenya to envision the utopia of feminist funding, discuss the challenges to feminist movement building and share what they are learning from flexible funding. Grantees provided feedback to Womankind on how we can continue to improve our funding to make it more accessible and responsive to the needs of feminist movements.
In response to grantee feedback before and during the convening, we’ve rolled out several good practices, such as:
- Facilitating a Fund Guidelines Webinar prior to each fund opening so applicants can ask questions before taking time to draft their applications.
- Holding start-up calls with grantees when grants are issued to discuss queries, expectations and reporting requirements.
- Creating a bespoke due diligence process for grassroots groups which enables them to access funding without formal registration or organisational structures.
The importance of feminist partnership
Within and beyond our grantmaking, Womankind builds long-term, trust-based relationships with our partners which allows us to provide support and accompaniment in response to the needs they express. This can range from reviewing their funding applications to other donors and sharing internal policies to sponsoring attendance at global movement building spaces. For example, in December 2024, Womankind supported 16 feminist organisations to attend the 15th Association of Women in Development (AWID) Forum in Bangkok, Thailand.
Womankind also creates learning spaces for partners to connect, strategise, and build collective power and solidarity within and across movements. We work with our partners to document learning, for example through blogs published on our website.
