Department of Women’s Affairs Grant: Enhancing Afghan Women’s Empowerment

The three-year $26.7 million “Afghan Women’s Empowerment through a Sub-grant Umbrella Mechanism” (AWE-SUM) program is designed to strengthen the capacity of women-led/focused CSOs to contribute to the social, economic, and political development of Afghan women through the provision of financial and technical assistance to support women-specific activities in the following areas:

1. Implementing activities that improve the status, safety and well being, human and legal rights, and livelihoods of Afghan women and girls;

2. Delivering services that directly address the social, political, and economic needs of Afghan women and girls;

3. Undertaking efforts to increase the participation of Afghan women in development as implementers, change agents and beneficiaries; and

4. Creating or strengthening mechanisms and channels by which Afghan women can access information, network, and take advantage of personal and professional development opportunities.

Applicants will propose approaches to implementing the following Activity Components and indicate how those approaches will help accomplish the Activity Objectives:

1. Awarding sub-grants for technical and organizational capacity building of eligible organizations, including equipment, and for the activities of such organizations;

2. Assessing organizational and technical capacity needs of eligible organizations and developing responsive interventions;

3. Overseeing sub-grant implementation to ensure that in addition to successful implementation of activities, CSO institutional strengthening and technical capacity building within recipient organizations is achieved; and

4. To support the above components, developing and implementing a comprehensive communications plan and strategy to generate widespread interest in the sub-grant program among women’s CSOs and to develop and manage an information campaign about the program to inform other stakeholders.

The following link will take prospective applicants who are interested in this high visibility program to the full solicitation. Click on #1, “Download Application Instructions.” http://apply07.grants.gov/apply/UpdateOffer?id=8833

I. Background:

Seven years after the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghan girls and women are starting to recover from the severe restrictions and mistreatment they were forced to endure under that notorious regime. Now living under a Constitution that ensures their access to education, employment, and legal rights, women have an official framework to support their personal and professional development. With the exception of constitutionally mandated quotas for women’s representation in Parliament, however, all indicators of women’s status reveal that enforcement of constitutional rights lags woefully behind enactment. A combination of poverty and deprivation, ill health, illiteracy, discriminatory customary laws, harmful traditional practices, physical and emotional abuse, and overall insecurity conspire to keep women at the bottom of Afghan society. With forced and early marriage, high fertility, the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world, and a life expectancy of just 44, Afghan women have little opportunity to develop themselves or participate in the development of their country.

The international community is heavily engaged in supporting capacity building within the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) to improve its ability to address the many needs of its largely impoverished population. Governmental capacity is so weak and the challenges of development so great, however, that civil society organizations (CSOs) are needed to help the GIRoA meet the short- and long-term needs of the Afghan people. In other parts of the world, government agencies have found that partnering with CSOs is an effective means of delivering essential services to less advantaged citizens, carrying out needed social and economic programs, and achieving development goals. Citizens come to rely on CSOs as well to bring information about critical educational, political, economic, health, and environmental issues and to advocate on behalf of communities for resources to meet local needs. Like the GIRoA, CSOs in Afghanistan must also strengthen their ability to manage, implement, communicate, and advocate if they are to play a greater role as partners in development.

As the GIRoA and donors make decisions about development priorities, the allocation of resources, and which populations to serve first, civil society organizations able to advocate effectively for their constituents will be able to influence those decisions. Moreover, because development resources available to CSOs are likely to be limited, CSOs able to compete successfully for funds by writing compelling proposals, delivering persuasive arguments and presentations, and tapping into established donor networks will likely carry the day.

To ensure that issues facing women are sufficiently addressed—and for development in general to be successful and sustainable—women must play an active role as both change agents and beneficiaries. Yet research suggests they have a long way to go to be effective at either. Indeed, one study identified fundamental constraints facing women’s organizations:

There are still elements in Afghan society that are reluctant to let women gather in groups….Ordinarily, working on community issues is not considered normal behavior for women anyway…Men generally see women’s gatherings as trouble because of disputes arising from rivalry and because women may be exposed to polluting people or ideas…. There are no grassroots women’s organizations per se because family rivalries, social taboos, lack of spare time and so on override feelings of solidarity between women.

Within women’s civil society organizations, the technical and institutional maturity level is poor, and the needs are great. Many CSOs do not even recognize what their capacity building needs are. In general, women’s CSOs need to improve their capacity to assess needs, design responsive interventions, develop, manage and implement/deliver programs, manage operations, finances and people, build alliances and network, make decisions, prioritize, plan strategically, establish input, output, outcome and impact indicators, monitor and evaluate performance against those indicators, communicate effectively, conduct outreach and advocacy, and mobilize resources—in addition to building capacity in the technical sectors in which they wish to work. Moreover, women’s CSOs “that want to influence policy and decision-making processes still have much to learn before they become consistently effective organizations, since most lack the vision about how to influence policy. The vast majority of indigenous CSOs are limited in their ability to comprehend the political decision-making processes and do not know how to formulate a timely and opportune advocacy strategy capable of achieving its objective.”

Nevertheless, with very little assistance, few resources, limited capacity—and at times formidable resistance—women’s organizations have not only survived but continue to grow and contribute to development efforts.

While the official number of Afghan women’s civil society organizations is unknown due to insufficient record keeping, approximately 2,400 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—both local and international—are registered with the Afghan Ministry of Planning. Afghan women run many of these organizations and tackle development challenges such as basic literacy training, income-oriented vocational skills training, and very basic health services and health education. Some local organizations partner with international NGOs to implement micro-credit programs in addition to rights awareness and gender education to begin changing the harmful cultural practices that limit women.

A number of factors support increased USAID assistance for women’s CSOs in Afghanistan. These include the pronounced and pressing need, as articulated by the international community and Afghan women, and the growing number of women’s CSOs seeking support. In the last two years, USAID/Afghanistan has received an increasing number unsolicited applications from women’s organizations requesting funding for activities ranging from running small education and health initiatives to launching radio stations and producing feature films on issues important to women. The proposed umbrella sub-grant activity will enable USAID to support a greater number of these initiatives while, at the same time, building the capacity of the recipient organizations.