A Gender Justice Lab recap
ILC’s Gender Justice Labs began in 2023 to facilitate in-depth discussions about gender-just approaches in the development sector. On June 26th, the Financing for Feminism Gender Justice Lab brought together five key speakers from GIZ, UN Women, Plurales, WGWLO, and NLC South Africa to discuss challenges and potential solutions in funding feminist, gender-responsive, and gender-just approaches to land rights issues.
Anti-Gender Rhetoric
Isa Mahmut, of GIZ, opened by highlighting an increase in anti-feminist and anti-rights ideology, especially among those who make the funding decisions and lead the conversation surrounding project funding. He poignantly described their intentions to “destabilise, divide, and conquer.”
As a result, women’s organisations have experienced both the shrinking of the development sector as a whole and targeted defunding and targeted cuts to gender equality which is increasingly being painted as an ideological concern rather than a key development issue. Harmful rhetoric may include purposeful misinformation, organised campaigns, and the delegitimisation of women’s organisations.
Anti-feminist pressures were also mentioned by other speakers, with Veronica Luna from Plurales who highlighted her organisation's fight against anti-gender ideology globally and, specifically, its strands in Argentina. In South Africa, Laurel Oettle noted global increases in Afrophobic violence that are disproportionately affecting women and children, and a national sensitivity to the term “gender”, despite its existence within national legal systems.
Global Funding Decreases
Zohra Khan (UN Women) began with a quite sobering statistic: in 2025, not only was there a 23.1% drop in official development assistance (ODA), but less than 1% was dedicated to women’s rights organisations. She makes the key argument that feminist organisations are crucial but underfunded. Laurel also emphasised the rapid pace of reduced funding for land and feminism, which is both hard to predict and unstable, with major legislative changes around non-profits increasing pressure on women’s organisations. These legislative changes, also discussed by Veronica, can include the deprioritisation of long-term processes, meaning actions must be short-term, typically six to twelve months maximum.
Grassroots Challenges
“We are not globally fundable” - Pallavi Sobti-Rajpal (WGWLO)
As Zohra emphasised, in the current climate of decreased funding and shrinking civil space, there is a need to prioritise funding for grassroots organisations. Furthermore, Mahmut noted an inability to implement gender-just projects as resources or funding are cut off. Grassroots organisations are, in many cases, “expected to deliver more with fewer resources.”
Veronica discussed several primary challenges within grassroots organisations. Her organisation aims to develop new strategies for environmental concerns, prioritising funding that can directly support women’s organisations while maintaining life and ecosystems in their territories and adapting to local struggles to make women visible. But while fighting for funding in an increasingly shrinking development sector, they have had to avoid certain “buzzwords,” including feminism and climate change. She echoed Isa’s point that in Argentina, people are being persecuted for receiving international funding, meaning her organisation has to avoid exposing the women they are funding to risks.
Key challenges mentioned by Pallavi included the fact that national government institutions do not always meet international standards, grassroots organisations are not visible enough to receive funding, and their work is not easily packaged to meet funding standards. Creating structural change and long-term transformation for women requires work that is intangible and thus difficult for donors to track.
Solutions Going Forward
On the global scale, gender mainstreaming and gender-responsive budgeting are crucial. As Isa emphasised, women’s organisations must be considered a pivotal part of democracy and human rights. Implementing women’s rights across various projects requires intersectional, sometimes out-of-the-box thinking, as Zohra highlighted in the benefits of gender-responsive budgeting. She suggested that donors must be more flexible, simplifying access and providing direct support in ways that prioritise feminist actors and priorities.
Other solutions fall along those same lines. Pallavi emphasised the need to ensure that the work we are doing does not make women dependent on the organisation but rather empowers them well beyond it. This can only be accomplished through the direct and flexible funding of women’s organisations. Laurel’s network, NLC South Africa, is exploring ways to increase funding flexibility to put more money in women’s hands. They are attempting to generate their own kinds of income, which would not be restricted and would increase their ability to be more independent
Finally, the last solution focused on the benefits of international networks. Pallavi discussed the need for funders to understand the social infrastructure of networks as a form of capital, as it can be crucial to mobilising funding, co-design, and collective strength. She stated that “the deepest infrastructure of any social movement is human, and it’s very relational”. This also encompasses a need to invest in South-South knowledge exchange, and another factor, also mentioned by Veronica, the uplifting of local women’s voices in international spaces. International and national coordination, supported by networks such as ILC and its programmes, including the Gender Justice Lab series and Women 4 Women, is crucial to this process.