Leading From The South

Women’s Fund Asia (WFA) is a regional women’s fund, committed to supporting women and trans* people to enhance and strengthen their access to human rights. Established in 2004 as the South Asia Women’s Fund, the fund was created to address the lack of resources for smaller grassroots organisations in South Asia. In March 2018, SAWF transformed into Women’s Fund Asia, with a bigger mandate to fund rights-based work across 18 countries in Asia. Our core mandate is to support women’s and trans* rights groups and activists in Asia, address the non-availability of resources for women's and trans* rights work in the region, and support strategies and interventions designed, implemented and led by women and trans* people. We provide fiscal and technical support to our partners, working to advance women’s and trans* rights in their contexts. We aim to move towards developing a regional mandate, which is informed by national and sub-regional realities, and is responsive to the rights and needs of individual women or trans* people. Leading from the South (LFS) is a special fund created to resource women’s and trans* rights activism in the Global South (over 4 years), initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It supports activism devised, implemented, and led by women’s and trans* rights organisations in the Global South. Through grant-making, capacity building, and other resourcing, LFS will strengthen women’s organisations, movements, and networks—especially their advocacy capacity. The fund is being implemented by four women’s funds: three regional funds—African Women’s Development Fund (Africa and the Middle East), Fondo Mujeres del Sur (Latin America and the Caribbean) and Women’s Fund Asia (Asia)—and one global fund, AYNI, the Indigenous Women’s Fund. Alliance building and investing in strengthening capacities will be a key component of the programme. The facilitation of such spaces (at the national, sub-regional and regional level) by WFA will aim to ensure collective reflections, learnings, and building cross-country and cross-region solidarities. The focus will be to link the voices and experience of those working at the local level with those at the national and regional level. Addressing Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals – working towards gender equality through empowering women and girls – is a key focus of the Leading from the South Programme. To effectively work towards achieving the SDG Goal in an expansive and sustainable manner, it is critical to have a framework, rooted in the voices, experiences, and leadership of women and trans* people? The programme framework is rooted within the three main principles of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – Substantive Equality, Non-Discrimination, and State Obligation.