BY Sapphire Alexander
For Caribbean feminists, making a little do a lot is a common practice.
Despite leading groundbreaking work to safeguard human rights, Caribbean feminist movements remain largely underfunded and under-resourced.
In a 2020 article, AWID revealed that 58% of the 3,739 feminist organisations from Latin America and the Caribbean that applied for grants from the Global Fund for Women (GFW) between 2015 and 2019 were operating on an average budget of $30, 000 USD or less. When examining the budgets for young feminist-led or LGBTQIA+ organizations, this number becomes even smaller.
In 2024, amid multiple intersecting crises, the funding landscape begins to appear a lot more dire. As governments reform their national budget allocations and international donors become more conservative about the type and quantity of funding provided, the case for a specialized fund to provide consistent support to Caribbean feminist movements is strong.
As it stands currently, there’s no regional fund to support women’s rights in the Caribbean. As noted by Equality Fund in their Feasibility Study for a Caribbean Fund for Women’s and LGBTQI+ Rights, “The Caribbean is one of the only regions in the world without a dedicated, regionally focused women’s rights and/or LGBTQI+ fund, which has a direct correlation to how little funding goes to movements in the region.”
This lack of Caribbean-based funding means that feminist organizations must often seek international donors to support their advocacy efforts. This approach provides its own unique challenges.
Donors looking in from the outside tend to cast a one-size-fits-all approach to provide funding for the region without recognition of the nuanced challenges faced by Caribbean feminist activists. These challenges can range from restrictive legislation governing the operation of NGOs and the receipt of donor funding, to negative cultural connotations of feminism and a very small regional feminist community. Many international donors will evaluate the validity of a potential Caribbean grantee using metrics from Western nonprofits that have greater access to resources and a different cultural approach to philanthropy.
For a region where “feminism” is largely still considered a “bad word” and where corruption and negative stereotypes can create an unsafe environment for human rights defenders, the size and scale of Caribbean Feminist movements are significantly smaller than their Western counterparts. Further to this, the consistent grouping of the Caribbean region with Latin America also poses a challenge, with the smaller Caribbean region often receiving a lower percentage of grant funding when lumped together with the much larger Latin America. This grouping, rooted in a colonialist understanding of these regions, fails to account for the historical, political, ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences between the two regions.
What’s more, the number of Caribbean organisations receiving funding from international donors is often quite a few compared to those supported in some other Global South regions.
All that to say when Caribbean feminist organisations are placed in a general application pool with other regions, they don’t stand a chance.
If Caribbean feminists do receive funding, there’s still a balancing act of determining how to dismantle systems of oppression whilst aligning with the values of the donor organizations. For a region already scarcely funded, activists must carefully toe the line to maintain positive relations and ensure that funders continue to find investment in the region worthwhile. For example, movements receiving funding from “neutral” donors can feel pressure to be less openly radical whilst relying on this funding. Additionally, as feminist activists, it can feel like a bit of an ideological paradox to accept donor funding from countries that have contributed to the historical exploitation of our region’s people and resources. In a way, we become once again indebted to our former colonizers as a means to dismantle inequalities that are a result of their exploitation.
Activists may also be hesitant to demand the funds that adequately sustain their work.
Sarah Anne Gresham of Intersect Antigua, a non-profit, shared, “ One challenge we’ve faced is procuring funding that’s not restricted to projects. For a few years, we had project-specific funding that required unremunerated labour. So while we had resources to complete projects, the people themselves would not be paid. We communicated these challenges through the proper channels and have successfully received core funding that directly remunerates activists and not just projects.”
Faced with these and other challenges, feminist activists within the region are strategizing new methods to support sustained advocacy work. Some organizations, such as CAISO, have introduced their micro-grant to support feminist and LGBTQIA+ advocacy. Others are exploring more community-centred approaches to resourcing regional movements such as mutual aid initiatives.
Thankfully, the tide is changing within a wider philanthropic society and some donors are shifting their grantmaking approach from a standard grantmaking model to a more participatory model. Regional advocates are being consulted as experts in their own lived experience and are aiding in co-creating funding strategies that meet the unique needs of their region. This process allows regional feminists to inform how funds are allocated, funding criteria and the metrics used to measure success for grantees.
One such example of this is the newly announced movement-led approach being spearheaded by the Global Fund for Women (GFW), in which they are “putting grantmaking decisions directly into the hands of gender justice movements.” It remains to be seen how this will be implemented but I hope that this new funding scheme is transparent, activist-led, sustainable and considers country context a priority in deciding how and how much funding is allocated.
While moves like that of GFW are positive, progress remains slow and in the meantime, Caribbean feminists continue to advocate for consistent, multi-year and flexible funding for the region.
Author Bio
Sapphire Alexander is a young feminist activist from Trinidad and Tobago. She is the founder of Caribbean Feminist, a youth-led digital advocacy platform, and an advisor for FRIDA, The Young Feminist Fund.