Leading from The South (2021-2025)

Leading from the South (LFS) is a ground-breaking partnership between the Dutch Government and a consortium of southern-led feminist Women’s Funds (WFs): the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), FIMI-AYNI – the International Indigenous Women’s Fund (FIMI), Fondo de Mujeres del Sur (FMS) and the Women’s Fund Asia (WFA). As Leading from the South 1.0 (LFS 1.0) has demonstrated, there are significant gains to be realised from southern-led, feminist WFs funding Southern Women’s Rights Organisations (SWROs) to determine how best to address injustice and unequal power relations in their own communities. In particular, supporting SWROs to advocate and lobby for change, has been vital to achieving gender equality. The Dutch Ministry for Foreign Affairs has, through the Strengthening Civil Society Framework and the SDG5 Fund, approved the continuation of LFS. Leveraging the successes and lessons of LFS 1.0, Leading from the South 2.0 (LFS 2.0) will strengthen the LFS Consortium as a feminist funding alliance, led by WFs in the Global South. LFS 2.0 will work across multiple regions, including the West African Sahel, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, the Great Lakes region, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean, and with a global focus on the leadership and advocacy of indigenous women. Women’s Fund Asia is a regional women’s fund, committed to supporting women, girls, trans, and intersex people led interventions to enhance and strengthen access to their 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, girls, trans, and intersex rights groups and activists in Asia, address the non-availability of resources for rights work for these constituencies across the region, and support strategies and interventions designed, implemented and led by women, girls, trans, and intersex people. We provide fiscal and technical support to our partners, working to advance women, girls, trans, and intersex 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, girls, trans, and intersex people. In the LFS programme, WFA specifically focuses on supporting Asia based SWROs and supporting the activists and organizations in the Pacific in their journey towards the inception of the regional Pacific Feminist Fund.