Women-led organisations’ response to the Ukraine crisis

Prior to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian women’s organisations were focused on working towards gender equality in Ukraine, prevention of and support to survivors of domestic violence, and protection of women’s human rights. Service provision to survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) by women-led organisations (WLOs) represented one of three pillars in the mission of women’s organisations, along with protecting women’s rights and ensuring equal rights and opportunities for women and men in all spheres of public life.

The post-invasion pivot

This rapidly changed following 24 February 2022, as 7.1 million people were displaced across Ukrainian borders to other countries, and 4.3 million children were internally displaced inside Ukraine. In response to the growing humanitarian needs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) across Ukraine mobilised their resources and expertise to provide critical support to people displaced by conflict. Ukrainian NGOs have been at the forefront of delivering emergency assistance, including food, water, shelter, healthcare and protection. Among them, WLOs swiftly pivoted in their work to provide essential services and humanitarian assistance to vulnerable women and girls amidst escalating tensions and displacement. This required agility and adaptability in the face of evolving challenges. WLOs expanded their programming to meet the changing needs of affected communities, including providing assistance to internally displaced persons, supporting host communities, and addressing the specific needs of women, children and other vulnerable groups.

Amidst the complex operating environment, collaboration and coordination between WLOs, international partners and donors have been crucial for maximising the impact of frontline humanitarian response by WLOs. By mobilising resources, scaling effective response activities and funding response programming designed by WLOs, these actors have enabled women’s organisations to reach more women and girls at risk of GBV and supported the increased reach of frontline WLO programming to women and girls in eastern Ukraine as the conflict has continued. However, numerous challenges persist, including access constraints, security risks and funding shortfalls. Moreover, the protracted nature of the conflict underscores the importance of sustained support for WLO humanitarian programming in Ukraine.

The urgent needs of women and girls and the move to meet them

Women in conflict-affected areas of Ukraine face an increased risk of gender-based violence, further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, when women and girls experienced increased violence from intimate partners and other forms of domestic violence within households during quarantine. In February 2022, already vulnerable women and girls had often exhausted coping strategies and limited access to services. Specialised services to GBV survivors and women and girls at risk of GBV were identified as a priority by humanitarian donors and operational agencies alike, seeking to target 149,445 women and girls during the first 12 months of the crisis. This target increased further as the needs of vulnerable women and girls in affected communities became apparent in assessments and monitoring; in February 2023, the Humanitarian Response Plan announced that 1.2 million women and girls would be targeted for GBV response.

Civil society quickly mobilised as first responders to affected people displaced by the Russian invasion in 2022, and many women-led organisations became the most accessible provider of services to vulnerable women and girls. While responding to the urgency of these needs was in line with the focus of women’s organisations of providing services to GBV survivors and protecting women’s rights, it constituted a departure from their core work and planned use of resources. In order to urgently support access to critical services and humanitarian aid for 7.8 million women and 2 million girls in need of assistance, women-led organisations swiftly pivoted to reprogramme funding and rapidly mobilise donor support for humanitarian response activities targeting women and girls. In addition to reprogramming funding from human rights and development donors supporting gender equality and women’s civil society in Ukraine prior to February 2022, WLOs now also came into contact with humanitarian donors and agencies.

Significant interest from protection-mandated agencies and donors to scale up GBV services to the vulnerable women and girls that constituted the target population of women’s organisations created a positive environment for partnership between international humanitarian actors and WLOs. Rapidly mobilised funding from international agencies allowed women-led organisation the Centre for Women’s Perspectives (CWP) to scale up emergency shelter for vulnerable women and girls beyond its initial projections, due to the availability of funding and the willingness of humanitarian agencies to adapt their criteria for partner funding to the context. During the first six months of the conflict, humanitarian funding was focused in the Lviv hub in western Ukraine, where the Centre for Women’s Perspectives operates.

The CWP was established in 1998 to uphold women’s rights by combating violence against women, promoting women’s participation in decision-making processes in Ukraine, and implementing and advancing the position of women in society. Funding discussions with several donors were initiated by the CWP to address the need for emergency shelter for vulnerable women and girls in February 2022, and following unanimously positive responses from the five donors approached, the CWP scaled up its initial plan and opened multiple shelters for vulnerable women and girls in March–August 2022.

New challenges for Ukrainian WLOs

The influx of humanitarian funding, donor interest in GBV response, and willingness of many international agencies to lift restrictions and criteria that often disqualify women’s organisations from accessing funding provided a new challenge to WLOs in terms of organisational development and strategic growth. While low-level and poor quality funding for women’s organisations in Ukraine had previously been the main threat to WLO capacity, the flood of funding and demand for WLO implementing partners was its own challenge that threatened to undermine the decades of strategic planning and mission focus of Ukrainian women’s groups. In the face of overwhelming need and abounding inquiries from international actors seeking to quickly begin programming across various humanitarian sectors, space for dialogue about an organisation’s mission was limited. Pressure from international actors to sign up local organisations as implementing partners often necessitated firm pushback by WLOs. In some cases, international humanitarian agencies operating as donors sought partnerships with women’s organisations for general distributions regardless of specific focus on vulnerable women and girls. This created a strategic challenge for women-led organisations in adhering to their organisational mission while responding to new and emerging needs created by the Russian invasion.

The destabilisation of the funding and operational environment for women’s organisations and local GBV actors required concerted efforts across networks of women’s organisations to coordinate and share capacity among WLOs. Pressure on local organisations to respond positively to the sudden abundance of partnership opportunities presented a challenge to the leadership of many organisations starved of funds and stretched to capacity following the Covid pandemic. Women’s organisations such as the CWP had been faced with a twofold increase in demand for domestic violence services between 2019 and 2020, leading to an increase in workload both in operations and policy advocacy, in order to address the increasingly visible gaps in services for women and girls facing violence. In 2022, this demand increased exponentially as operations increased tenfold.

WLOs worked hard to create a dialogue about the importance of their strategic focus on vulnerable women and girls, and addressed the risks of unsustainable expansion through reactive and short-term operations in response to demand from international agencies. In rural areas outside of the Lviv hub especially, local women-led organisations were operating in challenging circumstances with already strained capacity, financial means and operational resources. As the footprint of humanitarian response moved further east in 2023, WLOs such as the CWP have pivoted from providing direct support in western Ukraine to increasingly providing capacity-strengthening and strategic support to WLOs operating closer to the frontline, as they negotiate funding and partnerships with international actors in order to scale their programming to the needs of vulnerable women and girls.

Conclusion

As established women’s organisations in western Ukraine shift to sharing capacity with WLOs working further east, the importance of work protecting women’s human rights and gender equality become increasingly relevant to humanitarian planning and response. It is essential that the rights of women and girls remain at the centre of the humanitarian response, and women-led organisations are well placed to influence and inform humanitarian decision-making. WLOs remain committed to providing lifesaving assistance and support to women and girls affected by the conflict, and they are also looking to the future. There are opportunities for innovation, collaboration and resilience-building to mitigate the impact of the crisis and support long-term recovery efforts through the multifaceted work of WLOs on gender equality, prevention of violence, and women’s participation in decision-making processes. In order to lead this work, WLOs invite the sustained and flexible support of international partners to the implementation of their mission now and moving forward.

Iryna Trokhym is the Vice Head at the Centre for Women’s Perspectives (Центр Жіночі перспективи) and Coordinator at the Call to Action Field Implementation (CAFI) network for capacity-strengthening of WLOs in Ukraine.