Gender Fund: How Do I Apply?

Overview

The open Call for Country-level Grants aims to advance gender equality and women’s leadership. We envision a gender-equal world where all people can live fulfilling lives – where systems and societies are just and inclusive, and women and girls belong in all places where decisions are made. To enable us to partner with a wide range of organizations, we will provide three grant types – Anchor, Domain, and Catalytic – each with its own purpose, range, and requirement for selection.

Through this open call for country-level grants, we will:

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  Support organizations that address root causes and foster systemic change.

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  Provide flexible and longer-term funding, including dedicated resources for organizational strengthening.

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  Ensure that 100% of the grants will go to Global South and locally-rooted organizations and at least 75% of our grants will be to women-led organizations. Co-Impact invites initiatives that focus on countries listed below:

   

  • Africa: Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa.
  • Asia: India, Indonesia, Philippines, and Sri Lanka.
  • Latin America: Brazil, Mexico, and Peru.
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  Prioritize an intersectional lens throughout our process – during the review, diligence, and selection.

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  Respect that the organizations we partner with are in the driver’s seat and best placed to determine the most effective approaches to achieve enduring change.

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  We recognize the critical role that Women’s Rights Organizations and Feminist Movements play in advancing gender equality. Co-Impact commits to ensuring at least 10% of our funding will go to organizations that identify as these groups.

Grant Types

Co-Impact has three Grant Types that will support and nurture promising initiatives that focus on:

• Systems change with the aim to improve gender-equitable outcomes and women’s leadership in the health, education, and economic opportunity sectors.
• Institutional change to advance women’s ability to enter, rise to, and thrive in leadership positions in the academic and professional domains of law and/or economics.

• Anchor Grants

  This grant will support systems change initiatives that aim to improve gender-equitable outcomes and women’s leadership in the health, education, and/or economic opportunity sectors. Each grant will support proven ideas to be ‘adopted at scale’ to benefit at least one million people. The estimated range of Anchor Grants is between US $5-20 million over a period of 5 to 6 years.

• Domain Grants

  This grant will support initiatives that focus on institutional change to advance women’s ability to enter, rise to, and thrive in leadership positions in the academic and professional domains of law and/or economics. The estimated range of Domain Grants is between US $2-4 million over a period of 5 to 6 years.

• Catalytic Grants

  This grant will nurture promising initiatives that are either in the Pre-Anchor stage (focusing on health, education, and/or economic opportunity) or the Pre-Domain stage (focusing on domains of law and/or economics). This grant type does not support new, experimental ideas; instead, we will support early-stage initiatives with a well-developed idea that has been tried in a specific context and would benefit from exploring pathways for sustained change at scale. 100% of our Catalytic grants will go to women-led organizations in the Global South.  The estimated range of Catalytic Grants is between US $1-3 million over a period of 3 to 4 years.

  No one grant type is considered more important than another. Anchor and/or Domain grants are not limited to any organization type but differentiated based on their sectors/domains of focus. Grant sizes are also not intended to communicate importance, hierarchy, or type of cause or approach. Neither are they intended to position some grants as instrumental to the objectives of the other. The intent is to recognize that organizations operate at different levels, have different budget requirements, and are at varying stages of development. The diversity of grant types is intended to provide an opportunity to work with a broader set of actors than we have in the past.

Application Process

The Open Call process is now closed. All applicants have been informed of the next steps.