When I asked Moureen Kaputo, founder of the Women and Children Health Organisation in South Sudan, about the funding challenges facing her organisation, she did not begin by talking about budgets. She talked about girls forced into marriage before they turn eighteen. Girls withdrawn from school. Girls expected to marry men old enough to be their grandfathers. She spoke about patiently working with communities to challenge deeply entrenched social norms, knowing that change would not happen overnight but believing that each family persuaded represented a small shift in what seemed impossible.
I asked her about funding. Does she postpone ideas until the money arrives? Her answer was immediate. “I will not wait.” She explained that if funding was unavailable, the organisation makes do with very little, integrating new activities into existing projects, starting with what little they had, and documenting the work until they could persuade a donor to invest. “Tomorrow we can go to a donor and tell them we’ve already started,” she said. “We have started something. Then they can pick up from where we started.” It was one of the most powerful moments I experienced during the Third Regional Dialogue on Feminist Funding for Women’s Movements in East and Southern Africa in Nairobi in May 2026.
It was inspiring.
But it was also deeply unsettling.
Because while we celebrate this kind of resilience, we must stop to ask why feminist movements and women’s rights organisations are expected to survive like this in the first place. The Third Feminist Regional Dialogue organised by UN Women in East and Southern Africa through the ACT initiative, took place in Nairobi in May 2026.
The dialogue took place against a backdrop of shrinking aid budgets, growing geopolitical instability, increasing militarisation and escalating backlash against gender equality. But this was not another conference about funding gaps. Instead, it became something far more politically interesting. Again and again, participants returned to a simple but uncomfortable truth: the current funding crisis is not simply the result of difficult economic times. It reflects a political economy that has never been designed to build long-term feminist power: the capacity for feminist organisations and movements to set their own agendas, build durable constituencies, influence public policy and shift the structures that produce inequality. Instead, funding has too often rewarded projects over movements, service delivery over organising, and short-term outputs over lasting political capacity. It is intentional.
For years, feminist organisations have become extraordinarily good at surviving. We have learned to stretch impossible budgets, redesign programmes overnight, absorb ever-expanding reporting requirements and somehow continue delivering for the communities we serve. But something else has quietly disappeared in the process: time. Time to think politically. Time to analyse. Time to imagine. Time to build strategy together.
Movements and women’s rights organisations are not built through projects alone. They are built through relationships, political education, collective analysis and trust developed over years. Those things cannot be squeezed into six-month grant cycles or funded only when they produce immediately measurable outputs. They require infrastructure. They require places where people can gather, challenge one another’s assumptions, build shared analysis, and develop collective political strategy.
One observation made during the dialogue has stayed with me. One of the greatest casualties of the current funding crisis is not simply the closure of organisations. It is the shrinking opportunity for feminist movements to gather across countries and regions simply to think together. That struck me because we often talk about convenings as costs. Flights. Hotels. Workshops. Yet perhaps we should understand them differently. They are political infrastructure. They are where movements develop shared analysis, build trust across borders, forge alliances, test ideas and create the collective narratives that eventually shape policy, philanthropy and public debate. Without those spaces, movements become fragmented. And fragmentation is never politically neutral. It produces competition instead of solidarity, projects instead of movements, compliance instead of strategy.
Throughout the dialogue, participants questioned assumptions that have shaped feminist financing for decades. Conversations explored domestic financing mechanisms, pooled funds, philanthropy, private sector engagement and regional financing architectures. Nobody suggested there was a single alternative waiting to replace declining international aid. Instead, participants kept returning to a deeper question: what kinds of politics do different funding systems produce? Funding is never neutral. It determines who has the capacity to organise, who has time to build alliances, who remains trapped in permanent crisis response, who shapes public debate and, ultimately, whose political vision survives.
Perhaps that is why so many conversations turned towards political economy. Participants argued that feminist organisations need a much deeper understanding of how governments actually function: where budgets are negotiated, who influences spending decisions, how public resources move through institutions and why political commitments so often fail to translate into implementation. They spoke about reframing feminist funding not as charity or a niche social concern, but as an investment in governance, democracy, peace, economic stability and human security.
Perhaps that is why so many conversations turned towards political economy. Participants argued that feminist organisations need a much deeper understanding of how governments actually function: where budgets are negotiated, who influences spending decisions, how public resources move through institutions and why political commitments so often fail to translate into implementation. They spoke about reframing feminist funding not as charity or a niche social concern, but as an investment in governance, democracy, peace, economic stability and human security. While the report will capture the richness of these discussions, it is intended as a continuation of the conversation. As a network, we are committed to continuing this collective analysis and, once the report is published, identifying opportunities for collective action where feminist organisations can work together to influence funding pathways and advance shared priorities.
Listening to Moureen, however, I kept thinking about another political economy. One in which women leading organisations in development and conflict settings routinely compensate for failures in the international funding architecture through unpaid labour, personal sacrifice and extraordinary ingenuity. We celebrate their resilience. We applaud their innovation. We describe them as resourceful. And they are. But resilience should never become a substitute for justice.
Moureen should not have to fund violence prevention with no resources because international funding systems have become increasingly fragmented, risk-averse and transactional. Her determination is extraordinary. The system that requires it is not. If feminist organisations are expected to prevent violence, strengthen democracy, hold governments accountable, respond to humanitarian crises and build peace, then they need more than project funding. They need the political infrastructure that allows movements to think together, organise together, and exercise power over the long term. Because funding has never only been about money. It has always been about power: who gets to organise, who gets to endure, and ultimately, who gets to shape the future.
This blog was written by Joy Watson, COFEM Coordinating Committee Member.
