Global Fund for Women

In FYE2017 Global Fund for Women awarded 269 grants to 230 organizations in 60 countries. They helped strengthen and sustain women's human rights groups in five main regions of the world - Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our funding supported groups working to end gender-based violence, promote sexual and reproductive health and rights, and advance economic and political empowerment. This work included ending gender-based violence in garment factories in Asia, strengthening young women's leadership in South Asia, supporting Syrian women refugees in the Middle East, peace building and security in the Great Lakes region of Sub-Saharan Africa, addressing rising fundamentalisms in Europe and Central Asia and securing abortion rights in Latin America. We continued to give crisis support funding to women's groups facing extreme situations as well as providing ongoing support to women's funds to strengthen the women's movement globally.We continued to strengthen our organizational-wide learning and evaluation systems to capture and analyze data from grantees and stakeholders and to share learnings with internal and external audiences. Building on the work by social movement researchers and activists, we developed the Movement Capacity Assessment Tool to engage multiple stakeholders in a collective assessment of the capacity of their movement. Movement actors can use the results of the assessment to spark discussion on how to address challenges and move forward as a movement. We continued to refine our online grantmaking system and procedures with the goal of reducing staff and grantee time, while retaining an open process. Since launching the new system in 2015, we received close to 4,000 organizational profiles from grassroots women's rights groups in more than 150 countries that are seeking financial support.

Global Fund for Women continued to expand its advocacy by intensifying media, campaigning, and digital engagement activities. This year we completed an organizational restructure integrating our advocacy, strategic grantmaking, and movement-building functions into one Programs team to better align our focus on core impact areas and to maximize our ability to amplify the voices of women and grantee partners around the world. In fall 2016 we launched #DefendHer, an art-driven campaign that presented illustrated portraits and stories of 14 women human rights defenders globally to raise awareness of and spark critical conversations on women's rights and expand visibility. The campaign premiered at the AWID Forum for Women's Rights in Brazil and reached nearly 26,000 unique website visitors, generated over 100,000 social media engagements, raised $15,000 in crowd-sourced donations, and almost 2,000 messages of solidarity. In January 2017 we launched #BuildMovementsNotWalls to advance understanding of the implications of US policies on women's rights globally, incorporating the perspectives of grassroots women's groups speaking to the impact of the proposed US travel ban and the reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule. In spring 2017, we released #Disrupters, a series of case studies focused on five groups we supported in their early stages and whose bold ideas have propelled powerful social movements for women's rights in their communities. Our crisis response included online visibility and fundraising to support women's groups responding to the devastation of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti. Throughout the year our total audience reach grew 33% to nearly 1.5 million across the website, social media, and email allowing us to grow our base of support for women's rights issues. We obtained a 65% increase in major media hits, securing coverage of women's rights issues in international media from The New York Times to Newsweek, TIME, and more. Through our bi-monthly Movement newsletter we share resources and knowledge with grantee partners and women's movement allies. We also engaged a film team and initiated production on Fundamental: Women's Rights in a Volatile world, a documentary film series and impact campaign launching in late 2018/early 2019.