Money Matters: the Strategic Relevance of Donor Funding Targets and Conditionalities for Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality Results

Hivos provides financial support and capacity building to civil society organisations in the global South and East. Hivos has been successful at ensuring that women's empowerment and gender equality remains high on its funding agenda during the past two decades. This has been done through a two track strategy which consists of both ensuring that their Gender, Women and Development (GW&D) programme is one of the seven Hivos sector programmes, and that gender issues are mainstreamed into each one of the other sectoral programmes. Through their GW&D programme, they have funding mechanisms to specifically support women's organisations. In addition, all Hivos's other sectors combined are expected to allocate 15% of their core funding to organisations and activities that specifically benefit women. Based on their experiences, Hivos have formulated ten recommendations designed to contribute to increasing and mobilising resources for women's empowerment and gender equality. They include:

- the agenda of women's rights must be driven by civil society actors and not by governments, donor agencies or the private sector;
- Upgrading women's empowerment and gender equality to a sector status should have consequences for the Paris Aid effectiveness agenda, for ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results and mutual accountability;
- Multilateral, bilateral, international non-governmental organisations (INGO) and private foundation funding should insist on women's specific programmes, interventions, resources and gender performance criteria as a strategy to strengthen the mainstreaming of gender equality within the intermediary grant making institutions.