UN Women Fund for Gender Equality Announces USD $12.5 Million in Grants for women’s economic and political participation

Date: Monday, 3 December 2012

On November 30^th 2012, Ms. Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of UN Women announced the Fund for Gender Equality (FGE) 2011-2012 global grant recipients; 39 new grantees were selected from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia and were awarded grants totaling US $12.5 million for programmes that seek to advance gender equality and women’s economic and political empowerment.

This year’s grantees advance a broad range of efforts, including: engaging women as leaders of electoral reforms; supporting policy reforms to ensure implementation of economic empowerment programmes structured around women’s unions; providing comprehensive services for refugee, rural and urban women as well as creating alternative income-generating models.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the 12 new ambitious and innovative programmes include:

In India - IT for Change and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan will create internet platforms to build networks among key women’s organizations and to connect the 2 million rural women representatives in local government to their constituents.
In Afghanistan - conferences led by Afghanistan Watch will mobilize 690 rural women activists and 275 women leaders to identify priorities and challenges for women’s rights in the country and feed these into concrete policy recommendations to increase the role of women in peace talks, in the political and security transition and in politics at national and local levels.
In Mongolia, the organization Liberal Emegteichuudiin Oyunii San (LEOS) will train 1,050 potential women candidates to run for elected office
In the national and local parliamentarian 2016 elections.
In Hanoi, Vietnam, 2,230 migrant women will participate in community-based advocacy activities to increase awareness about gender equality and the vulnerabilities inherent in female migration with their host communities as well as within their communities of origin. Both female and male migrants will also participate in income generation initiatives, to run successful businesses and to effectively manage their resources through the FGE grant provided to Institute for Development and Community Health (LIGHT).

These new programmes, part of the second call for proposals of the FGE will begin implementation in early 2013.

The Fund for Gender Equality is the only global fund that is exclusively dedicated to women’s economic and political empowerment. This partnership between UN Women, and regional, national and local women’s organizations and governments is an innovative approach to advancing women’s empowerment as an essential part of realizing rights, accelerating poverty alleviation and advancing sustainable development. The Fund is based on a model in which women implement their own programmes in their own countries based on their priorities with direct multi-year grants of up to US $1 million and technical support.

For more information on the work of the Fund for Gender Equality in Asia Pacific, please contact Caroline Horekens, FGE Programme Specialist for Asia Pacific (caroline.horekens at unwomen.org)