Call for Proposals on Strengthening Women’s Movements in Crisis and Transitional Countries

Call for Proposals on Strengthening Women’s Movements in Crisis and Transitional Countries (Angola, DRC, Swaziland and Zimbabwe)

(Também disponível em Português/ La version francaise est disponible)

The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) is calling for project proposals from women’s rights organisations in Angola, DRC, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. OSISA will support proposals that seek to define and drive clear gender and women’s rights agendas in these countries. OSISA will provide programme and institutional support to the organisations to build their capacity and enable them to take leadership in strategic planning, articulating, implementing and advocating for women’s rights in their countries. Selected organizations will become core partners that OSISA will work closely with for the next three years, to support its broader objective of building and sustaining vibrant women’s movements at national and regional levels in Southern Africa. The overall goal of this initiative is to build and sustain vibrant women’s movements that are equipped to define and firmly keep women’s rights issues on national agendas in contexts where these are often lost and placed at the peripheries of national priorities due to other more pressing national struggles.

Across the above 4 countries, categorised as transitional (Angola and DRC) and crisis (Swaziland and Zimbabwe), support will be given towards:

• Innovative ideas for building solidarity (support) with women in countries that are relatively stable in the region, as working in crisis contexts can be lonely and frustrating;

• Structured exchange of experiences, lessons and strategies towards sustaining vibrancy within the movements across the crisis and transitional countries;

• Efforts to broaden the base of the women’s movements in these respective countries.

• Initiatives to mobilize grassroot constituencies and widen the movement-bases; and

• Projects that promote cross-sectoral dialogue and synergizing within the women’s movements to maximize the benefits of the often limited resources available for women’s rights programming in conflict and crisis situations.

In addition to the above, some country-specific criteria are listed below:

Angola

In Angola, OSISA will prioritise proposals that seek to:

• Support women’s participation in electoral processes;

• Mobilize and unify the women’s movement;

• Facilitate exchange and engagement between Angolan women and counterparts in the rest of the region, (especially in the Anglophone region);

• Establish and address the impacts of resource extraction on women and girls in the country;

• Support efforts to define and push for a clear coordinated women’s rights agenda, as the country undergoes reconstruction and transition.

DRC

In the DRC priority will be given to proposals that seek to:

• Provide coordinated responses to sexual violence, especially in the eastern parts of the country (including, but not limited to, building the skills and capacity of law and law enforcement agencies to deal with rape and other forms of sexual violence; amplifying the voices of victims and survivors etc)

• promote women’s participation in politics and governance under the new political dispensation;

• examine and intervene to address the gender-based impacts of the country’s “resource curse”; and

• amplify the calls for a women’s rights agenda as part of the consolidation of democracy in the country.

Swaziland

Given the constitutional and governance crisis in Swaziland, and the relatively high levels of HIV and AIDS in the country, OSISA will support proposals that seek to:

• ensure that HIV and AIDS are the core business of the women’s movement;

• construct a discourse that clarifies the link between women’s rights and HIV and AIDS;

• ensure progressive law and constitutional reforms, for the advancement of women’s rights; and

• creatively locate and address the situation of women and girls in the governance crisis in the country.

Zimbabwe

In Zimbabwe, support will go towards efforts that highlight the impacts on women and children of the current governance crisis. Key among these would be:

• creative efforts towards capturing and articulating the violation of women and girls’ rights within the governance crisis, and potential advocacy efforts towards alleviating these;

• women’s participation in electoral and constitutional reform processes;

• impacts of the crisis on women and children living with HIV and AIDS;

• creative efforts towards developing strategies to balance the strategic and practical needs of women, (which is often a challenge in contexts of crisis);

• innovative efforts towards capacitating the women’s movement to keep gender and women’s rights on the national agenda.

Approach

• OSISA will advance grants to selected organizations and institutions, to provide institutional as well as programming support, in order to create a core of grantees and partners in each of the crisis and transitional countries, to be the lead and core of the movement-building that OSISA seeks to facilitate in the next three years.

• Programming funding will be granted to organizations with demonstrated capacity to advance women’s rights and the funding will be restricted to the priority areas identified per each country (as indicated above). Institutional support will also be given to support salaries, training of staff and organizational development needs, as well as overheads.

• Requests of between US$25,000-$50,000 per year for up to three years, beginning in 2008, will be considered.

• Applications should include specific requests for technical assistance and a detailed three-year budget.

• OSISA will also commit time and resources to providing technical backstopping to these core organizations, as well as documentation and learning from this work with women’s organizations in crisis countries.

Grant-making Process

• The OSISA Gender Working Group will assess all the proposals received. Those that best advance the priority areas in the respective countries, and are also in line with OSISA’s strategy (2008-2010) will be identified.

• OSISA will then engage the prospective grantees in discussions to ensure a clear understanding of the concept and ensure a shared vision;

• OSISA will advance grants over a three year period, payable in three annual installments to selected organizations as per its general policy and terms of grant-making.

Monitoring and Evaluation

OSISA will retain a project coordinator who will work closely with the partners, monitoring and assisting with technical backstopping. OSISA will also commission an evaluation at the end of the three year period, for learning purposes.

Full terms of reference are available in Word-compatible format [62KB]

For further information, contact:

Alice Kanengoni

Gender Programme Advisor

OSISA

Tel: +27 11 4033414 (office hours 0830-1630 Monday-Friday)

Fax: +27 11 403 2708

Email: alicek@osisa.org