Our Grants:

You may apply for an SFM grant if you are a women’s, girl, trans, and intersex rights individual activist, or if you are a women, girl, trans, and intersex-led group and network working for women’s, girl, trans, and intersex rights at the local, sub-national, and national levels. If you are a regional or global organisation or network, or a feminist fund, you are not eligible to receive an SFM grant.

Only organisations and groups with an annual budget of USD 100,000 or lower are eligible to apply for SFM grants.

SFM accepts both one-year and two-year organisational applications. You are eligible to apply for a two-year grant if you have received at least one WFA grant from 2017 onwards: Leading from the South, Strengthening Feminist Movements and Claiming Our Voices: Beijing +25 Review & Follow Up.

Please read the eligibility criteria in the call guidelines documents of the SFM grantmaking programme carefully to decide whether to submit your application. 

The call is open to applicants based in the following countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.

SFM are core grants, which can be used by organisations, groups and networks to fill various funding gaps in the organisation. This support is not necessarily tied to ‘projects’. This is flexible funding that can cover operational costs, including staff salaries, rent, audit and costs related to communications, trainings, meetings, as well as resource gaps for ongoing/new programmes and collaborations. While applying for the grant, you can request for partial operational and partial programme support or only operational support.

Individual applicants can only apply for programmatic grants and are not eligible to apply for core support. Programmatic grants include support for specific programmes/projects, whether ongoing or new initiatives.

WFA’s Strengthening Feminist Movements programme exists to support grassroots groups which have limited access to funding. Groups with an annual budget of over USD 100,000 do not fit the eligibility criteria under this programme. Flexibilities may be offered in exceptional cases based on the context and criticality of a proposal.

WFA welcomes new initiatives/groups to apply for one-year organisational grants.

If your organisation is unregistered or does not have the required documentation, please write to us at least two weeks before you apply and we can explore your options. WFA is only able to contract with individuals or organisations that fulfil the legal requirements to receive foreign funding in their country.

Yes, individual activists can apply. We provide these grants based on the application’s merits and the work’s relevance in/to the larger women, girls, trans, and intersex rights movements. If you are based in Bangladesh or Pakistan, write to us first to explore your options. Read the eligibility criteria to see if you are qualified to apply. Applicants can apply for a maximum of USD 8,000 for a period of one year.

Not for the SFM Programme. If you are a women’s, trans, and intersex fund registered and working in the 19 mandated countries for a minimum of three years, please write to us to explore other options for collaboration.

Yes, we may consider supporting social enterprises depending on the context and the nature of the organisation’s work, and alignment with WFA’s mission and vision. They must apply feminist and rights-based approaches in their work.

Activists who identify as asylum seekers and refugees; forcibly displaced; low income migrant workers; and survivors of trafficking, smuggling and other types of forced displacement, and their organisations, are also eligible to apply for this grantmaking programme. However, individuals or organisations applying for grants must be based in the mandated countries covered by the call.

The duration of a grant is either 1 year or 2 years. An individual grant cannot exceed USD 8,000 for a period of one year. If you are applying for a one-year organisational grant, you may expect the grant to be for a maximum of USD 15,000 for a period of one year. If you are eligible to apply for a two-year organisational grant, you may be allocated a grant up to USD 30,000. The final size of the awarded grant lies with WFA and depends on funding availability.

No, the SFM programme does not focus on emergency grants. However, WFA supports current and past partners under its crisis response grantmaking, including direct relief and humanitarian assistance. Do not hesitate to reach out to us at sfm@wf-asia.org and we will do our best to connect you with other funding sources.

The SFM grants programme is not meant to support interventions that directly respond to emergencies or humanitarian relief to constituencies. However, 15 percent of the total grant budget will be allocated for crisis response, collective care, resilience building and risk mitigation.

This portion of the budget will act as a contingency fund for organisations or activists to: a) mitigate risks, b) address impact of crises, c) advance collective care and well-being for activists and organisational staff, and d) and build resilience. Crisis response refers to the support required by the grantee partner in case of crises. The funds may also be used for collective care, such as psychosocial counselling or other forms of support for team staff members.

The application package is available for download in English and 14 regional languages: Bahasa Indonesian, Bangla, Burmese, Filipino, Hindi, Khmer, Lao, Mongolian, Nepalese, Sinhala, Tamil, Thai, Traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese. You can submit your application in any of these languages. We also accept application responses written in Bahasa Melayu, Dzongkha, Tetum, and Urdu, although we regret that we do not currently have the capacity to translate our application package to these languages. If you are applying in the above languages, please download the form and email your application to sfm@wf-asia.org by the deadline.

Applications can be made online or via email. The online application form is only available in English and can only be submitted in English. Please visit the SFM page for more information.

If any of the required documentation is in a language other than English, you will need to provide a translated and attested copy of the same document in English. If the audited report is in a language other than English, at the minimum, the following pages should be translated into English: Auditors’ opinion page, Balance Sheet, and Income Statement. You still need to submit the full audit report in the original language.

Individuals and organisations can only submit ONE application for the Strengthening Feminist Movements Programme. If more than one application is submitted, only the first submission is considered. If you are submitting an application for a two-year organisational grant and are not selected, you will be considered for a one-year organisational grant if you indicate the same in the relevant section of the application form. Additional applications from an organisation will be considered if they are made on behalf of/with a partner or collaborating organisation.

Yes. As mentioned above, it is possible for an organisation to apply as a lead applicant with another for collaborative work. However, WFA’s review and selection process aims to ensure that the funds are not concentrated and are more equitably distributed amongst selected grantees, geographies, strategies, and interventions. Take into consideration the maximum grant support provided in this programme when deciding on the modality of your application.

This is a challenge for WFA, as it is for other donor groups, largely due to limited resources. WFA does consciously work to include newer partners each year, while also supporting existing partners to ensure sustained support over a period of time. With the given resources we have for each grantmaking cycle, we make this tough decision allocating the money between new and existing partners. This call for applications invites applications from both new applicants as well as old partners. However, past or current partners holding SFM 2022-23 or 2023-24 grants are not eligible to apply via this call for applications. They will be directly contacted by WFA for a separate process for renewal of their grants.

Please write to us at least two weeks before the closing of the call. If you have some documentation, but not all, make sure to share the explanation in your application.

If you don’t have most of the mandatory compliance documents, it’s likely that you are not eligible, so do check with us. Do note that an application will not be shortlisted for review if any of the required documents are missing and/or explanations are not provided for not submitting them — such an application will be considered incomplete. Only applications in the correct application format will be processed. The checklist can be found here.

After the call deadline, the WFA team develops a database of all the applications received and undertakes shortlisting based on technical criteria. The shortlisted applications are then reviewed on the basis of strategies and activities proposed, approach, criticality of intervention, context, leadership, and constituency being supported, amongst others. The WFA team contacts the shortlisted applicants via email or calls to clarify any additional questions. This is followed by financial and legal due diligence, as well as reference checks. The final shortlisted applications are then shared with WFA’s regional advisory committee. Based on the advisory’s feedback, grants are then finalised.

From the submission deadline, it takes about 4-5 months to review and shortlist applications. This includes time for verification of all documents, response by applicants to additional queries, interviews as may be needed, reference checks, and review by our grant advisory committee.