Grant Making
Women’s Fund Asia is strongly committed to supporting women, girls, trans, and intersex rights organisations and activists in their work to advance human rights in the region. We fund groups that are committed to a rights-based approach.
At present, we conduct grantmaking under three main programmes:
Strengthening Feminist Movements
Under this programme Women’s Fund Asia supports women, girls, trans, and intersex rights groups, individual activists, women human rights lawyers (through fellowships), and subnational, national and regional networks.
Leading from the South
Leading from the South is a programme resourced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. It supports activism devised, implemented, and led by women’s rights organisations in the Global South. The fund is being implemented by four women’s funds in the Global South, of which Women’s Fund Asia is the implementing fund in the Asia region.
Linking and Learning
Two types of support are available under this grantmaking programme:
Travel grants: Women, girls, trans, and intersex rights activists and organisations in all 18 WFA-mandated countries may apply for travel grants for advocacy and capacity development.
Organising collaborative events grants: Organisations may apply for support for organising exchange visits, convenings, trainings, or workshops.
We are not currently accepting applications for Linking and Learning grants at the moment, but we anticipate that we will reopen this sometime in 2021.
Women’s Fund Asia believes economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights are interlinked and that organisations work on a continuum of rights violations and deprivation. We fully recognise that interventions happen at multiple levels and are crosscutting and intersectional. The priority areas for WFA are as follows:
1. Strengthening Feminist Voices: Supporting and strengthening grassroots feminist leadership and movements has always been a priority for us. In the past, grants have supported institutional strengthening, capacity development for groups and their constituencies, grassroots mobilisation, campaigns, research, advocacy, and outreach.
2. Access to Justice: We support groups and individuals working on increasing women, girls, trans and intersex people’s access to justice, including raising legal awareness among communities, creating pathways and mechanisms for survivors to access lawyers and the judicial system, training women paralegals, supporting women lawyers, and others.
3. Autonomy, Decisions, and Sexual Rights: We support promotion of the right to sexuality, decision-making, and bodily autonomy of women, girls, trans and intersex people. Beginning with supporting work on child and forced marriage and young women’s leadership and choices, this priority area also grew to encompass groups working on LBT rights, abortion rights, and sexual and reproductive health and rights.
4. Movement and Labour: We support women, girls, trans, and intersex people’s right to safe migration, economic justice, and labour rights, with a particular focus on women working in vulnerable, informal, and stigmatized sectors such as sex work, garment factories, tea plantations, domestic work, and migrant labour.
5. Environmental Justice: We recognize the need for feminist leadership in resource management, disaster risk reduction and resilience, addressing climate change, and sustainable development. We support work aimed at securing women, girls, trans and intersex people’s rights over natural resources across a diversity of constituencies, including women with disabilities, women farmers, garment factory workers, and indigenous and Adivasi women.
Individuals and groups working on women, girls, trans, and intersex rights issues that are particularly relevant in the current context in the region, which are not covered by the five thematic areas above are also welcome.