Watering the Leaves, Starving the Roots

Executive Summary It has been almost eight years since AWID launched the initiative that asked, “Where is the Money

for Women’s Rights?” The objective of this action-research effort was:

• To mobilize more and better quality resources for women’s rights organizing by generating knowledge and analysis of the funding landscape and the financial situation of women’s organizations; and

• To promote collective strategizing for resource mobilization from a feminist movement building perspective.

This report presents research findings and analysis gathered over the last two years to help women’s rights organizations and their funder allies make sense of the rapidly changing funding landscape and adapt their resource mobilization (and distribution) strategies accordingly.

Three major trends impacting significantly on the funding landscape for women’s organizations have emerged in the last few years that require our attention and analysis:

1. The presence of “women and girls” as a priority—at least a rhetorical one— in nearly every funding sector and in the mainstream; 2. The upsurge of a diverse array of private sector actors in development financing and philanthropy; and 3. corporatization and specifically, its impact on development agendas and financing.

As we approach 2015, with the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, as well as the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the upcoming launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a post-2015 UN development framework, many women’s rights organizations, movements and their allies are reviewing and reflecting on past progress and exploring visions for the future. With many parts of the world still reeling from the impacts of the financial crisis and economic recession sparked in 2008 and with the realities of changing world geopolitics, questioning of development strategies and the ideology that drives those strategies is well underway (though of course for some they have always been in question) and women’s rights and social justice activists are putting forward diverse understandings of development and its connections (or lack thereof) to economic growth. They are pointing to the critical need to better factor environmental sustainability as a central part of new development models, and opportunities to explore alternative strategies to those that have dominated in the past, promoting deep structural transformations.

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