Workshop for WomenStrong partner: Gender and Development for Cambodia
This year marks the 10th anniversary of WomenStrong International, a global non-profit serving local women-led organizations worldwide with trust-based funding, tailored capacity-strengthening, and peer-to-peer exchange and community building in our Learning Lab.
In the course of these 10 years, and in the years previous, as we recognized the need and opportunity to found WomenStrong, we saw over and over again, in urban and peri-urban communities across the globe, that local women were the true experts on what their communities most needed, and on the solutions and investments required to meet those needs. Yet they were almost never at the table where policy and financing decisions were made, and they lacked the technical and financial resources to implement their solutions on their own.
In Ghana, Haiti, and India the lack of access to quality healthcare spurred some of our founding partners to develop whole systems of mobile women’s health clinics to cover the populations they serve. Ensuring access to sexual and reproductive health information and care is also the mission of our current partners in the Philippines, Madagascar, Zambia, Mali, and Mexico.
In Ghana, Haiti, India, and in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda, our partner organizations have created Girls’ Clubs to help empower vulnerable girls with the life skills and confidence that will enable them to thrive. Most of these partners then went on to create Boys’ Clubs, appreciating boys’ needs for the same attention and confidence-boosting as they develop into feminist allies and champions of their sisters, mothers, families, and communities.
WomenStrong partner: Women’s Justice Initiative, Guatemala
Our partners in Afghanistan, Malawi, Peru, and Guatemala strive as well to further girls’ education and empowerment, including by persuading families to allow girls to remain in school, thereby delaying the early marriage and pregnancy that could curtail their options and lifelong earning potential.
In the 24 countries where WomenStrong has partnered with local organizations over the last 10 years, most address the epidemic of violence against women and girls out of necessity. Our partners in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and here in the United States have focused in particular on working with survivors of sexual violence, often accompanying them through the legal system. Understanding how to move the needle in their own settings and seizing opportunities to collaborate transnationally whenever possible, they all engage in fearless advocacy aimed at stopping gender-based violence.
Our partners in Bangladesh, India, Uganda, and El Salvador have also taken on entrenched systems and practices as they seek to build women’s collective economic security and grow their power in the workplace. In training women workers on their rights, strengthening unions and worker associations, and setting the agenda for advocacy campaigns within their countries and worldwide, these partners regularly find themselves at odds with factory managers and owners, their national ministries of labor, and the global brands.
Each of our 19 current partner organizations, knowing best what it needs to maximize its effectiveness and ensure its sustainability, determines its own capacity strengthening agenda, which is supported by WomenStrong and designed to be flexible, to accommodate shifting needs on the ground.
Our partners set the agenda, too, for our Learning Lab, where regional groups gather to share strategies, hear from experts, and ponder the many challenges on their minds, from feminist fundraising to compelling storytelling and advocacy, to customizing their monitoring and evaluation to learn what they are eager to discern about their programs’ effectiveness. WomenStrong’s expert Knowledge & Learning team helps our partners elicit that information and structures evaluative opportunities for WomenStrong itself, to help us understand how useful our partners have found our support.
We do our best to help our partners raise their voices and amplify their solutions on the global stage so they can widen their networks and funding sources and get those very solutions out to larger organizations with the platforms and capacity to adopt, adapt, and disseminate these solutions even more broadly.
Across the globe now, women-led organizations share many of the challenges faced by us all; the impact of conflict, climate change, economic stress, migration, the lack of investment and a fiercely anti-liberal, anti-feminist, anti-human rights movement increasingly infecting our politics worldwide.
WomenStrong partner: Roots of Health, Palawan, Philippines
Our partners have stepped up in response. Examples of their nimbleness include the Girl Up Initiative, Uganda’s climate-smart program for girls in their public schools in Kampala; the fleet, lifesaving humanitarian actions taken by Roots of Health in Palawan, Philippines, and GENET- Malawi in response to their recent super-typhoon and cyclone, respectively; and the remarkable overnight transformation of all our partners into humanitarian organizations as COVID-19 shut each of their countries down, putting already marginalized girls and women at even greater risk.
We’ve also witnessed stunning courage on the part of numerous partners as they persist in the face of hostile governments and political climates including Cambodia, India, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, El Salvador and last, but not least, in Bangladesh, where labor leaders are routinely detained and a close labor rights activist colleague was recently murdered.
WomenStrong’s model — trust-based giving, together with mutual learning, strengthening, connecting, convening, and community building – has thus far served to reinforce our faith in local women and the organizations they lead. Their insights and expertise, their deep familiarity with the needs of those they serve, and their acute sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs, pulse and aspirations of the community, make them the experts we need to lead effective, empowering, empathic, community-based development.
Now we just need to make sure that they have permanent seats at the table where decisions are made.
About the Author: Dr. Susan M. Blaustein is the Founder & Executive Director of WomenStrong International
