Grant making
Multi-year Funding
Urgent Action Fund - Africa will provide Fast Response Fund grants to approximately 70 WROs.
Uraia Trust and CREAW will provide multi-year grants to approximately 25 local WROs each (total of 50) to implement their own programming through calls for proposals. The maximum size of grants will be 3,000,000 Kenya Shillings, and there is no minimum, but applicants urged to apply for the size of grant that they can confidently handle. The maximum duration is two years: the first round of grants will run from 2020 to 2022 and the second from 2022 to 2024. The first phase of calls will seek concept notes from WROs in 42 of the 47 counties of Kenya, with Uraia and CREAW each covering the geographic areas where they are present. Additionally, Uraia will grant national, regional and county-wide calls that will cover large areas or the whole of Kenya. Then geographic areas will be again reviewed before issuing the 2nd round call in 2022 to ensure that the remaining 5 counties are fully covered as well. The funds can cover costs such as: core/general support to the organisation, capacity building for staff/volunteers, activities for women, strengthening advocacy for women rights, engaging men and boys in changing masculinities, engaging feminist awareness raising with women and girls, participation in networks, or any or all of these things.
The 8 call for proposals will not have any preference for themes or activities as long as it meets one or more priority needs of women and girls in the proposed areas. Collectively, the grantees together will ideally cover a wide range of women and girls priority needs, and be accessed by a diversity of groups, including different sized organisations across Kenya, with at least one successful grantee per each of the 47 counties of Kenya. Each applicant is expected to focus as narrowly as they like in terms of sector and geographic coverage. For example: focus on one sector or one target group or choose to cover a wide range of priority needs, areas, and groups. The Concept Note budgets may include funding for the organisation salaries, office running costs, training, capacity building, systems improvement, services for women, advocacy, networking, or gender responsive or transformative approaches to raise community awareness about women and girls rights. It could fund one or more of these things. The selected grantees will receive financial support to strengthen their systems and processes and help them to finance their capacity development plans and core work, which in the longer term will eventually help them to gain access to more predictable funding opportunities and improve their quality of service delivery and advocacy. Small / nascent / unregistered / underground WRO will have equal changes to win multi-year grants as do medium and strong WROs because each will be scored against other WROs in their own size category. Applications will be independently scored by 3 staff at Uraia / CREAW. The PSC will review the summary of each concept note, evaluator notes/feedbacks, recommendations, and scores to ensure that the process has been done fairly with no bias or conflict of interest. They will approve by unanimous consensus on the selected grants based on:
1) The objective, transparent, inclusive, and verifiable criteria and processes (applied to each size category);
2) Ensuring an overall balanced and fair representation to women rights organizations by geographic area (ex. at least 1 per county); and
3) A diversity of groups of women and girls (ex. disability, religion, ethnic minority, LGBTI and other marginalised groups)
Following PSC selection of the WRO finalists, Uraia and CREAW will conduct due diligence checks on the organisations before signing the MOU. Then they will conduct Organizational Capacity Assessments before supporting the ultimate recipient WROs to develop capacity building plans and providing the sub-grants. Uraia Trust will focus support on the larger ultimate recipient WROs, while CREAW will support smaller grassroots ultimate recipient WROs including even those who start with no registration or bank account (CREAW will support them to set up these basic systems before receiving the grant). Grants will be provided to local community-based organizations, national non-government organizations, membership-based organizations, grassroots networks, etc. working to further women rights.