Participatory Grant Making

CPF funds co-created solutions to accelerate progress towards gender equality and the SDG 2030 Agenda together with women’s NGOs—with a focus on reaching the most under-resourced and underrepresented grassroots women and community-based organisations.

We aim to provide an alternative to current practices that have led to short-term, donor-driven and project-based funding. CPF does not just fund projects; it invests in organisations to strengthen feminist activism that address the priorities of the communities and navigate the shrinking democratic space for civil society. Throughout the grant-making process, we will strive to have partnerships that are not just transactional, but transformational.

Organisation Strengthening and Technical Support

CPF wants to ensure that the women’s NGOs and CBOs receiving grants have the best chance of success with their initiatives. Through long-term partnerships that include systematic organisation development approaches, the grantees are supported to gain measurable institutional capacities in order to sustain their work towards their mission and serving the communities. These will include technical capacity building in:

• Project management, financial management and strengthening systems, structures and strategies for organisation effectiveness (i.e., through organisation development (OD) assessments, change management, etc.)

• Resource mobilisation and alternative fundraising

• Gender analysis, mainstreaming and inclusion strategy development

• Using and generating data in order to design evidence-based projects for social norm change

• Advocacy, local governance and community mobilising

Additionally, the funded NGOs and CBOs are trained and guided in co-implementation models to ensure the community women, men and youth are consulted and to prevent the risk of power imbalances being mirrored by all grantees to their constituents.

Action Research and Advocacy

Research and advocacy plays an integral role in CPF's strategy to identify epic successes and failures in having equitable partnerships and "shifting the power" to communities in the global south. CPF aims to bridge the gaps between research and practice by testing and evaluating ways to catalyse community-led development in its own processes.

CPF invests in documenting its experience in participatory grant making, as well as in conducting listening and learning conferences with all its grantees to build an evidence base that could demonstrate how to catalyse community-led change. In this process, grantees will also be guided in conducting community-led monitoring and to improve how they can showcase their achievements, capacities and contributions to global development.

CPF has a wide network of research experts with diverse backgrounds composed of international human rights advocates, anthropologists, political scientists, lawyers, and social scientists, which will contribute to a multi-disciplinary approach in the foundation’s knowledge generation.

Women Empowerment and Leadership Academy for Development (WELeAD)

CPF is developing a learning programme for managers and staff of NGOs, development consultants, researchers, volunteers and other practitioners to strengthen networks and provide a platform to decolonise development consulting and advisory services.

CPF will provide full and partial scholarships in order to increase the number of local experts with technical capacities to support global development goals and programming in the global south. The programme will utilise a blended approach, combining online and face-to-face sessions together with hands-on mentoring and knowledge exchange.