Added
Updated
AWDF's grantmaking provides flexible, largely multi-year funding to autonomous women's rights organisations, collectives and feminist movements led by women, girls and gender-diverse people in Africa. Support is awarded through periodic open calls across distinct streams, including Open Grants, the KASA! Initiative and Komboa grants, and prioritises groups that other funders often treat as hard to reach or risky.
Alongside the awards themselves, the fund pairs grantmaking with capacity building, knowledge sharing and movement-building support. Grantees keep significant latitude in how the money is used.
African feminist movements operate in a strained environment that AWDF describes as an organised, funded backlash against gender equality, which raises the value of responsive, long-term funding. The fund's own campaign statements argue that earlier legal and social gains are reversible without sustained support for movements.
At the same time, the pool of African-led funds is small relative to the number of grassroots groups seeking support, and donor capital also reaches the same organisations through larger international funds such as the Global Fund for Women and Mama Cash, so competition for both grants and donations continues.
The fund's position rests on being African-led and feminist at the same time, an origin that underpins its legitimacy with the movements on the continent it serves. Its governance and accountability structures were built to keep the fund answerable to African feminists rather than to distant headquarters.
Its track record gives it scale that smaller funds lack: the fund reports more than USD 123 million disbursed to over 1,900 partner organisations across roughly 52 countries since inception, which supports large, multi-country programmes and long-term partnerships.
Grant sizes follow the structure of each open call. In its most recent open-grant cycle, the programme advertised ceilings of up to USD 30,000 a year or USD 60,000 across two years, with awards concentrated in flexible multi-year support rather than single short grants.
Each funding stream, including Open Grants, the KASA! Initiative and Komboa, carries its own eligibility rules and award ranges, so the scale of support varies by applicant category and the maturity of the organisation applying.
