The unmet need for WLO access to direct humanitarian funding

Women-led organisations (WLOs) working in the humanitarian sector face difficulties accessing humanitarian funding in a system created by and for international actors. With record levels of support from donors in response to the Ukraine and Afghanistan crises in recent years, multi-year humanitarian funding has increased, but distribution of this funding has heavily favoured multilateral organisations. WLOs continue to receive minimal funding directly from donors. This is despite growing recognition of the value and role of WLOs, which are agile and nimble with direct access to women and girls through their presence and operations in conflict- and disaster-affected localities.

Additionally, propositions to address the humanitarian funding gap are developed through dialogues at the headquarter level that WLOs do not regularly have access to participate in, resulting in solutions that don’t address the specific barriers that WLOs face and fail to grapple with the totality of the problem and its impact, often further entrenching disparities. With the overwhelming balance of funding towards international agencies, humanitarian funding and decision-making spaces are often inaccessible to WLOs. While WLOs may be invited to participate in pre-orchestrated discussions about reform of the humanitarian system, opportunities to engage with institutional donors directly about their funding criteria, humanitarian priorities, and opportunities for new partners to apply for funding are very limited.

Barriers to greater funding

In the power dynamics of the current humanitarian funding landscape, WLOs face challenges articulating and justifying their funding needs, and in demonstrating their organisational capacity to effectively manage resources. Donors often perceive WLOs as higher risk due to factors such as their limited core funding, lack of institutional infrastructure, or perceived instability due to lack of overhead funding support. Furthermore, tentativeness and scepticism from institutional donors about the mechanics of transitioning away from working through expensive intermediaries to working with WLOs directly create an environment in which the burden falls on WLOs to accept any and all limitations on offers of donor funding, including limited or non-existent overhead cost support. This continues the vicious cycle of under-funding that adds increased financial pressure on and limits the resilience of WLOs, while impeding the inter-agency agenda to increase humanitarian funding directly to WLOs in order to better target and reach vulnerable women and girls in humanitarian settings.

For example, the dominant current practice of funding WLOs through large allocations to United Nations (UN) agencies – or to a lesser extent, multi-year block grants to international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) – for disbursement requires significant amounts of humanitarian funding for intermediary overhead costs before any funding reaches WLOs. At the same time, donor preference for low overhead ratios disadvantages WLOs, as smaller grassroots organisations have a higher overhead percentage than an international agency, despite the comparatively low actual costs of WLOs’ overheads compared to the overhead costs of UN agencies and INGOs.

The urgent need for direct funding

Without overhead funding or the large reserves that INGOs, UN agencies and established national non-governmental organisations have, WLOs need direct access to institutional donors or grant facilities in order to implement self-designed responses for their target population. They need access to funding to define their own programmes and build experience and confidence in project design, proposal development and implementation. WLOs are so often entirely reliant on project funding in order to resource humanitarian programming and organisational overheads. They require access to budgetary allocations in order to undertake rapid assessments and provide immediate lifesaving humanitarian assistance to vulnerable women and girls in their area of operation, to deploy staff, contribute to or co-lead coordination, and to design and develop longer-term projects with suitable partners. However, increasing reliance by institutional donors on UN agencies to deliver humanitarian programming entrenches inequality in access to resources and direct relations with donors. This is despite the policy commitments of international agencies and organisations, and indeed institutional donors themselves, to increase direct funding to local and national humanitarian organisations. Unfortunately, it seems that increased and more explicit policies articulating localisation objectives and support for local leadership do not reliably translate into improved funding opportunities for WLOs.

The current trend, which has enabled large donors to provide unprecedented levels of support for acute crises such as Ukraine, involves donors launching fewer calls for proposals and concentrating greater amounts of funding in each call. While this has allowed large amounts of humanitarian funding to be provided by donors to urgent humanitarian appeals, it moves donors further away from recent commitments to locally led response designed and implemented by organisations working directly with affected communities. This disadvantages women-led and other local organisations competing for funds to design appropriate and effective humanitarian responses, as they are likely to be smaller, less networked with institutional donors, and with comparatively limited administrative structures. For example, the complex bid requirements set by donors for large funding opportunities limit access by WLOs who cannot reach the required criteria for operating budgets. This trend perpetuates a system of selective access to direct funding, which in turn entrenches the hierarchy of ‘fundable’ organisations that relegates WLOs to the role of implementing partner to an international grantee, with limited input in or impact on project design and strategy. The repercussions of these trends are further entangled with the complex power dynamics that WLOs navigate in the humanitarian sector, such as patriarchal cultural conventions and restricted access to professional and industry networks for women-led organisations.

Wider trends in localisation

This pattern is a repetition of the power structures operating throughout the humanitarian system between local and international actors, e.g. traditional approaches to capacity-strengthening by INGOs and UN agencies keeping local partners dependent on international intermediaries in order to access institutional funding, instead of targeting the staff of intermediary and donor organisations to increase their knowledge and understanding of agency commitments to localisation and flexible financing. While there are donors that have adopted policies in line with such commitments, donor staff at field level are more often following standard practice than recent policy, and the mindset of staff at donor agencies is often an obstacle to working with WLOs. In practice this means that even if local organisations are able to compete for project funding, they don’t have the same access to negotiate grant conditions with donor partners as international counterparts do. This creates an expectation of failure among WLOs, which has the negative effect of discouraging many from attempting to compete.

In Lebanon, the funding environment is complex and competitive, spanning multidimensional crises, including the Syria response and escalation of hostilities in South Lebanon, and is dominated by UN agencies and INGOs. Despite significant presence of donor organisations in Beirut, direct access to donors in order to discuss organisational strategy and capacity and develop professional contacts is highly limited for WLOs. Success in securing funding opportunities and calls for proposals launched in-country are concentrated among international actors already known to donor organisations, creating a vicious cycle for WLOs unable to access donors or compete on an even playing field. Staff at donor and intermediary organisations may have more to lose from changing their current practice and diversifying away from known organisations, or may not prioritise relationship-building with specialised local actors working with affected communities on agendas such as preventing sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA), gender mainstreaming and gender-based violence (GBV) due to high workload and competing priorities. Concerns regarding language skills or fear of raising expectations of direct funding among local organisations may also be factors, which need to be addressed through donor policy and guidance regarding good practice for relationship-building with WLOs through networks and regional initiatives.

It is notable that examples where WLOs have been able to engage directly with donors have come at major international meetings rather than in the settings where they work, although this is also beset with limitations and exclusions. In my own experience, opportunities to engage directly with donor colleagues focused on GBV through international conferences and initiatives, such as the Prevention of Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) and the Call to Action on Protection from GBV in Emergencies, have enabled WLOs to raise their profile and initiate contact with donor and intermediary agencies. This creates further inequality, however, between those organisations who are able to travel to international meetings and secure funding for their participation, often based on visa status and language skills, and others doing highly impactful work at country level who are not able to leverage contact with technical specialists in the donor community in order to make contact with donor colleagues locally. The unintentional result of the restricted contact between country-based donors and local organisations is a gatekeeping system, in which WLOs are reliant on in-country INGOs or UN agencies to access donor funding, or must utilise a system of introduction by headquarter-based contacts in order to successfully navigate the contact process with a donor colleague based in the same city as their own organisation.

In order to circumvent the status quo of limited access to humanitarian funding for local organisations, WLOs such as Himaya Daeem Aataa in Lebanon have started initiating discussions with INGOs about publicly posted funding opportunities, in an effort to reverse the power dynamics that relegate local organisations to an implementing-partner role. By taking the initiative to propose a consortium of local actors in partnership with an INGO, WLOs are working to align funding opportunities with local needs and priorities, identifying a way forward for local humanitarian action designed and implemented by WLOs, while donors work to reform their policies and procedures for humanitarian funding.

Conclusion

It is my hope that these ongoing efforts by donors to meet their Grand Bargain commitments to funding locally led humanitarian action will blossom and bear fruit, and that the UN agencies and INGOs currently dominating the humanitarian funding landscape will embrace the opportunity to pivot from the status quo to a more effective and efficient humanitarian response sector led by local knowledge and action. In order to reach this future, however, humanitarian leaders need to hold each other accountable for progress towards increasing the percentage of humanitarian funding flowing directly from donors to local organisations, and ask why WLOs are not recipients of the funds and resources channelled to INGOs and UN agencies. Donors need to promote equitable funding practices by recognising the value of investing in organisational capacity-building and providing flexible funding mechanisms that cover both direct and indirect costs. They must also incentivise collective effort on capacity-sharing and wider shifts in power and resources among humanitarian actors if they are to attain the change that they want from humanitarian actors that appeal to them for funds.

As WLOs, we will continue to play our part by building strong networks and engaging with donors wherever possible to propose direct funding to WLOs, effectively communicating our impact and funding needs, and encouraging donors and intermediary agencies to look at how access to resources and direct relations with donors are controlled and what effect this has on the evolution of humanitarian leadership and response. WLOs have a vital role to play in the humanitarian system and we continue to fight and search for opportunities to achieve this.

Jeanne Frangieh is the founder and Director of Himaya Daeem Aataa.