Chronic underfunding of efforts to end violence against women and girls is not accidental, but a political choice whose consequences extend far beyond those it immediately harms.
At the beginning of this year, I was part of a process of reviewing funding applications to the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UNTF). The proposals came from across the African continent. I was not quite prepared for what it would do to me. I read accounts from Sudan, Malawi, Rwanda, Egypt and elsewhere, each one carrying the weight of lives shaped by violence, poverty, colonial histories, state failure and conflict. I know this terrain. I have worked in this field for years. None of it was new to me. And yet something in the act of reading these applications landed differently. These were not reports written at a distance. They were proposals shaped by people living inside the realities they were trying to change. They were asking not simply to be heard, but to be resourced. To be resourced for work that will address violence against women and children, the realities of those living in war-torn countries, those fleeing conflict in search of asylum, and those whose lives are made unbearable at the intersection of violence, poverty and overcrowding.
Threaded through them all was a brutal knowledge: only a fraction would receive funding. Not because the need was unclear. Not because the work was weak. But because there is nowhere near enough money, and the funding landscape is tightening at precisely the moment when it should be expanding.
That knowledge changes how you read. Each application becomes two stories at once: the story of what women and girls are living through, and the story of what the world is choosing not to fund. In context after context, organisations described violence that is not episodic but embedded, woven into war and displacement, into unpaid care and hunger, into extractive economies, and into a global inequity where low- and middle-income countries bear the cost of decisions made elsewhere.
UNTF’s portfolio offers a glimpse of both possibility and constraint. In 2024, it supported 180 civil society and women’s rights organisations across 74 countries and territories, reaching more than 14.7 million people. Its portfolio stood at around US$86 million in grants. These are not small achievements. They show what happens when resources reach feminist and women’s rights organisations. But they also reveal the scale of what is missing. In the same year, the Fund received around US$1.5 billion in funding requests. It was able to resource only a small share. Across the sector, organisations are being asked to do more with less, in contexts where violence is not receding and, in many cases, is intensifying.
This is not a technical gap in an otherwise functioning system. It is the result of political choices.
Official development assistance for gender equality has stagnated, even as commitments multiply on paper. According to the latest OECD data, funding for ending violence against women and girls constitutes 0.3 percent of Official Development Assistance. Put differently, even in one of the largest dedicated UN funding mechanisms for ending violence against women and girls, the scale of unmet need is staggering. In the UN Trust Fund’s latest global call for proposals, women’s rights organisations collectively requested support that far exceeded the available envelope; more than a billion dollars’ worth of urgently needed programmes will go unfunded, despite meeting basic eligibility criteria. At the same time, global military expenditure reached around 2.7 trillion US dollars in 2024, underscoring how vanishingly small the share directed to women’s safety, peace and recovery is by comparison.
At the same time, backlash against gender equality is hardening into policy, into funding decisions, into the narrowing of what is considered legitimate work. In many African contexts, these pressures are acute. Women’s rights organisations describe trying to keep safe houses open in the middle of hyperinflation, to sustain prevention work in communities repeatedly displaced by conflict or climate shocks, to protect survivors’ privacy in small towns where anonymity does not exist. They are often the first and only point of support for women seeking help. Yet they are still treated as peripheral, as risky, as too political to fund at scale.
Grants administered by the UNTF seek to reach smaller, under-resourced groups, including those receiving UN funding for the first time.
Research shows that when feminist movements are resourced, laws change, services improve, attitudes shift, and more women and girls can live free from violence.
If we took women’s and girls’ lives seriously, we would scale this approach. We would treat resourcing as a question of sufficiency, not scarcity. We would increase dedicated funding for ending violence against women and girls, including through sustained, multi-year contributions to mechanisms like the UN Trust Fund and the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF), and more importantly, we would fund feminist movements and grassroots organisations directly, without intermediaries. We would ensure that every new crisis or climate package includes explicit, well-resourced commitments to this work, rather than assuming that feminist organisations will absorb the impact without support. And we would change how funding flows: more core support, fewer short-term projects, simpler processes that do not exclude smaller organisations, and deliberate protections against political backlash and budget cuts.
But this is not the direction of travel. Across the sector, major funders are shifting towards funding fewer organisations at larger scale, in the name of efficiency and impact. In recent months, this has moved from quiet strategy conversations into something more concrete: signals that long-standing portfolios are being restructured, funders who are core to this work changing their funding strategy so that support will be concentrated among a smaller set of partners. The result? Many women’s rights organisations and feminist movements should prepare for significant loss. For those on the receiving end, this is not abstract. It is being experienced as a withdrawal already underway.
This is not a neutral recalibration. It is a redistribution of power. It favours organisations already equipped to absorb large grants, often larger, internationally connected entities, while those most embedded in communities and those doing feminist movement work are pushed to the margins. It risks hollowing out the very ecosystem that has sustained progress on ending violence against women and girls. What is lost is not only reach, but depth, trust and the slow, relational work on which change depends.
Feminist organisations do not simply deliver services. They build the connective tissue of more just societies. They accompany survivors through systems that were never designed for them. They shift norms in places where violence has been normalised across generations. They hold states to account when commitments remain rhetorical. They imagine alternatives in contexts where violence has come to feel inevitable. Their work does not only benefit women and girls. It expands the possibilities of what society can be. In a world marked by conflict, extraction and deepening inequality, feminist movements insist on something fundamentally different: that safety, dignity and freedom from violence are not privileges, but conditions of a just society. To weaken them now is not only to abandon women and girls. It is to accept a narrower, more violent world as inevitable.
Until then, those of us reading these applications will continue to hold both stories at once. In every proposal, a vision of what could change if resourced, and a record of what is being left unfunded by design. The distance between those two stories is not inevitable. It is chosen.
