‘Using Our Moral Will’ – 25 Years On, Global Fund for Women Aims for Lasting Change

The Global Fund for Women celebrates 25 years of advocacy and action for women and girls with a gala tonight in midtown Manhattan that features former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and journalist Christiane Amanpour. Forbes sat down with Musimbi Kanyoro, the organization’s CEO,  to discuss the progress and challenges of the last 25 years, and the state of development and advocacy for women and girls worldwide.

Q: Organizing and funding programs to advance the rights of women and girls worldwide is a mission that seems to be the topic at every development conference these days. And yet the horror stories unfortunately continue, on every continent. What’s your sense of where we are – and is progress really being made around the world?

A: We live in deeply contradicting times for women. On the one hand, we can look back only two decades ago and note huge achievements in women’s advancement in every aspect of life — health, education, finance, technology, communication and even safety. On the other hand, these achievements seem minor compared to the worsening poverty, violence, conflict, exploitation, fundamentalism, and indifference. Backlash threatens to reverse the gains so far achieved. Shooting a girl who promotes girls’ education or trivializing the rape of women and continuing to gang rape women are not signs of hope at all.

Yet, the Global Fund for Women also sees this as a time of opportunity, with bracing clarity. For the past 25 years, we have quietly built a network of women leaders and women’s rights organizations that have developed innovative solutions to advance women and girls rights worldwide. The greatest acts of courage for women were to translate our individual and private troubles in to public policy. Making the personal political and the private public has enabled women to break the silence on the abuse of women through battering, rape, genital mutilation, trafficking, rituals, harassment, fear, insecurity, and all forms of harm to women’s bodies and psyche.  Violence against women is no longer just “domestic.” Breaking the silence is critical because it allows women everywhere to collectively invoke moral judgments on our societies. Yes progress is much too slow, and women are still dying as they have always, but the window of opportunity lies in the fact some stories get told and they help us imagine what a changed world would look like. The story of Malala the Pakistani schoolgirl is one among many.  The fact that you are interviewing me, and you will tell the world matters. The role of media today is critical.

Q: You’re steering the Global Fund for Women through an important strategic phase in its history — and during challenging times on the world scene – how has the strategy evolved and how can the Fund change to meet the goals on a changing landscape?

A: I am firmly grounded in the knowledge that organizations are living mechanisms, and they have to evolve in order be effective. I have the support of our Board, staff, grantees and donors.

The Global Fund for Women was created in 1987 to support building a strong women’s organized movement that can speak up and influence philanthropy to support social changes that protects women’s human rights. We have intentionally focused human rights organizations in places of great need and minimal or no access to funding. Today, Global Fund provides nearly $8 million a year to women-led organizations and has distributed $100 million in grants to more than 9,000 organizations in 174 countries.

As part of our 25^th anniversary, Global Fund is on a learning journey to understand how we can maximize our experience and pave a new future with the objective of making our investments in the world deliver higher and better return to women and girls in efficient ways that are commensurate with today’s context. We have initiated several processes for the learning including an in-depth mining of our 25-year data on the activities of the women’s movement, which Global Fund supported to seed, and build and sustain. What emerged shows that the Global Fund for Women investments in women yield into stronger and more vibrant civil societies, healthier communities and greater peace and stability of families, communities and nations. Over 25 years, we have consistently worked to bring new voices into women’s movements, to start new conversations, sometimes on hard issues, and to push the philanthropic envelope to place women’s and girls’ human rights on the agenda.  Importantly, we have also supported women’s rights organizations to successfully advocate changing government policies and programs that have moved the dial toward women and girls securing their full human rights. These things we know how to do and will do more of them and do them better, but that is not the only change that we seek.

A future for the Global Fund for Women will include targeted focus of girls and young women because these populations are themselves the future and they must be supported to have their own voice, choice and resources to influence their lives.  We know that most mainstream funding and international programming for girls and girls’ does not sufficiently address issues around sex and violence. This gap was recently reiterated in the 2013 United Nations Foundation’s Landscape report on funding for adolescent girls. Because of its history on this issue, Global Fund is well-positioned to show the urgency for advocacy to increase funding to build the capacity of girl’s knowledge of their sexual and reproductive health and rights and to decrease their vulnerability to violence, two of the biggest roadblocks to school success for girls.

We also see the need focus on building a more influential women’s movement. To achieve this, it requires greater focus on partnership opportunities, and outcome-oriented collaborations with different players; many of whom we have not worked with before. We see great opportunity in facilitating women’s organizations to engage with private public partnerships, collaborating with men and boys and working with governments and communities to scale best practices

We are aware that many of our grantees are affected by climate change effects but also live in places political tensions, conflicts and wars. Add climate change and the burdens it brings to women and you definitely know that it is not the same world as 25 years ago.

Ultimately, building bridges in the future will not be done without tapping the potential of technology. We have an exciting new initiative — “Digital Women. “We want to learn from and invest in our grantees as they leverage new technologies. In Pakistan, grantee Blue Veins is using Twitter to mobilize female voters ahead of the country’s upcoming elections. The Fiji Women’s Rights Movement recently live-streamed its national Fiji Women’s Forum over the Internet and launched a live discussion on its Facebook account where more than 1,200 followers subscribe to its posts. A pro-democracy video created by Engagement Citoyen in Tunisia and funded by Global Fund for Women went viral last year and currently has been viewed more than 747,000 times on Youtube.

This year, Global Fund participated in the launch of Catapult – an online platform for donating to projects for women and girls internationally. We are still assessing our engagement with this platform, but we have learned one valuable lesson from it. Concerning donor engagement online — our efforts must market opportunities for greater connectivity between diverse individuals who share common concerns for the world, and not market the work of our grantees as products to be divided up piecemeal.

Q: Despite advances the statistics on sexual violence – both here in the U.S. and worldwide – continue to be staggering and the number of victims is a disgrace to society. We need both stronger laws and real enforcement – how can we tackle this problem?

A: By specifically focusing on rights-based advocacy in its funding priorities, Global Fund has successfully supported activism that has led to new laws and policies and, to an even greater extent, supported the “long-haul” work to ensure implementation of those laws. One of the legislative areas where Global Fund grants have had perhaps the greatest reach is laws and policies to prevent and criminalize gender-based violence. We know from the excellent study released last year by social scientists’ Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon that independent feminist movements have had the greatest impact, of any of the possible factors, on whether or not a country has good legislation against violence. Global Fund has supported a lot of that advocacy work over its 25 years– grantmaking to over 600 groups doing anti-GBV advocacy work in more than 113 countries through our Ending Gender Based-Violence program area alone.

We know that Global Fund grantees used their grants for advocacy that contributed to better laws, at the national level, on domestic violence and sexual violence, stronger anti-trafficking laws, and laws against FGM, in at least 25 different countries. The total number of women and girls who, today, have legal rights under these laws is more is more one billion. That shows us that the women’s movements that we have supported and been a part of are becoming more influential. They get laws passed. They get policies changed. They expand women’s rights and work to implement and give “teeth” to those pieces of policy and legislation.

Advocacy is hard to fund because it is long-term haul and its impact cannot be measured simply by statistical metrics. To truly overturn the structures and paradigms that allow violations of women, we need to create more social change impact in our communities and that requires more women at tables where vital decisions are made. To facilitate this, we have to mobilize women of all backgrounds and to create a powerful strategy to overcome longstanding barriers to equality and justice.

Q: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said that women’s rights are human rights almost two decades ago, and resources have clearly expanded to pursue social justice for women and girls. Are we doing enough? And can organized philanthropy do more?

A: We are not doing enough. We are not using our moral will to do what we know are the right and smart things for women. When the Global Fund was founded 25 years ago, large Foundations, at the time, could not think differently about getting funding directly to women’s groups. This has changed somewhat but not significantly even though there is more knowledge about advancing women’s rights. We can give examples of some progress but no nation in the world has yet achieved full equality for women.

Women are concerned about gender equality. Change will come not just when there is more funding, but when women are considered equal partners with men and have voice, choice and resources to contribute to world peace, development, environmental protection and economic growth.

We are at a tipping point for social change, because today we know more and have the means to effect change that we didn’t have two decades ago. But we are far from achieving meaningful impact because the problem is BIG and requires concerted global effort and moral courage to break tradition.

Organized philanthropy can make a difference if the funding is targeted towards addressing the root causes of women’s vulnerability including gender disparities, violence against women, poverty, keeping girls safe and free from exposure to risk such as bodily harm including early pregnancy, mutilations, etc. Women’s funds like the Global Fund for Women and over 40 other such funds in the global South, act collectively as members of the International Network of Women’s Funds. Global Fund for women seeded 31 of these funds and has awarded them $6.5 million in grants to reach corners of their countries where no international group can reach.   Global Fund For women based in the USA and Mama Cash based in the Netherlands are the two largest and oldest women’s funds.

Another area of urgent investment is in capacity building to improve skills and leadership of girls and women, policy makers and advocates as part of the broader agenda of strengthening social and political systems that can sustain change when laws and policies are in place.  But real success will come when philanthropic investments also keep organizations healthy and stable by providing general support. This requires funding for staffing, operations, structures, planning, monitoring and evaluation.  A 2008 Center for Effective Philanthropy survey of 79 foundation CEOs and 20,000 grantees of 163 foundations concluded, “foundations ought to provide operating support grants” to make the greatest impact on grantees.

Many argue that general support grants can’t be evaluated as effectively as project support. However, what is evaluated should reflect intended outcomes, and the level of desired change.  General support helps organizations build long-term sustainability and strengthen their capacity.

Q: Finally, I’m very encouraged by the networks – virtual and real world – that have formed over the last few years particularly among younger women. How important is encouraging this new generation of women leaders not just to protest and organize but to exercise real political power and societal leadership?

A: At the Global Fund for Women we believe that girls and young women hold the key to the future and so there is no question about the new feminism found in young women. But organizing isn’t going away. Can you imagine what would happen to one woman alone telling her community to stop cutting the genitals of their girl children? Organizing is powerful. Change is not going to come by sitting behind our computers in typing on the screen. We will need to go the squares of our city and occupy Wall Street to effect real change.

Today’s world has the largest generation of young people under 25 in history, totaling 3 billion or 43% of the world’s population. The majority (87%) of them live in developing countries; many are poor, with restricted rights, opportunities and choices, and inadequate access to quality education, health services and employment.  Adolescent girls are at highest risk of sexual violence, harmful practices and abuse and continued neglect of their rights and personal development.  Approximately 60 million girls ages 6-11 are not in school each year. Forty percent live in Africa and 35% live in South East Asia.

Encouraging these young people to take leadership includes being diligent about their education, health, security and opportunity. In her speech to the Women in the World conference recently, Hillary Clinton said:

“There is a powerful new current of grassroots activism stirring…enabled by new technologies giving women and girls voices like never before. We need to be smart and savvy about what this moment means for us. Let’s recognize that much of our advocacy is steeped in 20^th century top down engagement. The world is changing beneath our feet, and we must embrace 21^st century technology to advance women and girls’ human rights. Technology is where progress is coming for and where our support is needed.”

We agree.  That’s why we believe the opportunity for the future of Global Fund for Women must embrace both girls and young women, and technology and linking them is powerful.

Source:  Forbes.com 

Photos  by  Global fund for women