Digging Deeper for Change



Christine Campbell, Acting Executive Director

Recently the Canadian media reported that one in three Canadians is abused as a child. The statistic should shock us, but for those working to advance the rights of women and girls it’s all too familiar. The fact that globally one in three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime is only one of the many difficult realities that women face.

Women still make up 70 per cent of the world’s poor, because for the most part they do not have control over productive and financial resources, and despite the violence often perpetrated against them, women are still rarely invited to peace talks. Yet when we invest in women we’ve seen time and again that the benefits extend beyond the personal to the well-being of women’s families as well as the broader community. The Economist declares “Forget China, India and the internet: economic growth is driven by women.” But so little funding is available to women focussed, women-led programs and organizations.

A survey of 740 women’s organizations worldwide conducted by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) in 2010 showed that these organizations received very little financial support. In fact, their median income was $20,000, which is less than the annual salary of a minimum wage worker in Canada. When we add the income of each of these 740 organizations together, the total is $106 million, a fraction of Greenpeace’s 2010 budget of $309 million. It’s not difficult to comprehend why 20 per cent of the organizations surveyed feared shutting down operations due to a financial shortfall.

And this situation is reflected in Canada too. Among Canadian international civil society organizations (CSOs) with program budgets greater than $30 million, less than 7 per cent of their overseas budget supports autonomous women’s organizations. And despite Canada’s leadership in the promotion of child and maternal health, the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD) have only allocated 1-2 per cent of their total program funding over the past five years to programs where gender equality was the primary goal.

Last year a group of 21 Canadian international CSOs came together following a Women’s Rights Policy Group meeting to discuss the need for a systematic understanding of Canadian support for international women’s rights and to build a foundation for increased fundraising and strengthened programming. A working group was created to oversee the research and creation of a report about the evaluation and assessment of funding made available to women’s programming and organizations which was intended to capture the attention and the imagination of the Canadian government and Canadian CSOs.

The result is Digging Deeper: Towards Greater Action on Global Rights for Women and Girls. We hope you’ll read the report and discover more about Canadian investment in international development and the challenges of funding women’s rights. The report was commissioned by Crossroads and other CSO partners working to advance women’s rights to provide a base of information that we hope will raise questions and spark debate. Ultimately we hope to spur on more research and investment to strengthen Canadian initiatives in support of global women’s rights over the next decade and to increase giving in Canada. To make an impact we need to reach as many influencers as we can, so please share this report widely with your networks and help us reach others to explain why we all need to dig a little deeper to fund women’s programming and organizations.