Feminist Futures: Making the Case for More and Better Funding for Women’s Organisations

Published onFebruary 23, 2017

Our Advocacy Work

For the European Women’s Lobby it is a key priority to develop the political case for the better resourcing of the women’s movement. Increasing the financing for gender equality is a key factor to achieve equality between women and men across the EU and beyond. Several recent studies (see ‘Resource’ section below) have shown that globally, women’s organisations are key actors and the best placed to deeply enable sustainable change for women.

Our advocacy work is focused on raising awareness about these statics, disseminating this research, and making the case for more and better funding for women’s orgs to EU and National institutions, governments, foundations and corporations.

We work in cooperation with global and European women’s funds, coalitions and alliance of women’s organisations, and our 2,000 member organisations to collect new evidence, come up with innovative advocacy and lobbying strategies, understand the power dynamics of different sources of funding, and collaborate to bring the joint voices of women to decision-making spaces throughout Europe and the world.

AWID Forum 2016

In September 2016, Serap Altinisik of the Programme Unit participated in the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID)’s 13th International Feminist Forum, which took place in Brazil.

EWL was proud to host a session at the AWID Forum, titled “Competition or cooperation in financing women’s rights organisations? Implications of the SDGs agenda for global women’s solidarity” in collaboration with Womankind Worldwide, Saathi Nepal and the African Women’s Development Fund. In this participant-led session, we explored how the new, universal SDGs agenda will affect funding for women’s rights organisations globally, European-wide, nation-wide, regionally and at the local level.