OSISA Women’s Rights Programme: Promoting Women’s Economic Justice, Social & Legal Rights

Deadline: 29 July 2016

The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) is seeking proposals for its Women’s Rights Programme in order to support stronger women’s participation in key sectors of agriculture and mining, intending to make these sectors specifically work better for, and benefit women.

It invites grant proposals for interventions that seek to challenge the causes, remove the barriers, capitalize on the opportunities and catalyse transformation and change processes – across the political, socio-economic and legal spheres of women’s lives within and across the SADC region.

OSISA will also support work on extractives, economic justice and the food security shared framework to advance women’s rights and economic empowerment.

OSISA is a growing African institution committed to deepening democracy, protecting human rights and enhancing good governance. It forms part of the global network of Open Society Foundations and operates regionally from offices in Johannesburg and nationally in ten southern African countries

Objectives

Promoting Women’s Economic Justice
- Promoting women’s access to quality social services in urban and rural areas;
- Empowering women in selected key economic sectors (i.e. rural women farmers, women informal traders, women in the extractives sector, domestic workers, among others) and enabling them to demand economic justice;
- Building broad-based women’s movements and amplifying the voices of the least heard and most marginalised women (especially indigenous women, rural women, women informal traders, domestic workers and others) to influence policy and programmes that affect their lives.
Promoting Women’s Social and Legal Rights
- Advocating for gender-responsive policy and legal frameworks to protect women’s rights and enhance women’s access to justice (especially economic and social justice); and
- Ending violence against women (VAW) in selected sectors (i.e. in the extractive sectors, informal trade spaces, and domestic workspaces) as well as addressing the structural causes of violence against women and girls.
Women’s Leadership and Inclusive Participation
- Improving the quality of women’s collective leadership in politics and decision-making at local government and national levels;
- Building the capacity of women already in public office at various levels to engage effectively and participate in policy shaping;
- Enhancing women leaders’ knowledge and skills to effectively engage with the multi-layers and dynamics of power shaping public policy in the region;
- Creating and strengthening alternative spaces to enhance women’s inclusive participation beyond politics (e.g. community mobilisation, civil society spaces, etc.);
- Building and enhancing agency and vibrancy in women’s movements across thematic sectors.

Types of Grants

Policy and Research Grants: will be awarded to support efforts aimed at long-terms systemic change at the policy or legal level.
Anchor Grants: An anchor grantee is an institutional partner, with whom OSISA has a high degree of shared values. It is an organisation that has strong capacity, and plays a unique role in the region.
Capacity-Building Grants: can be awarded to individual organisations that seek to work with a large cross section of a community, but the strong preference is that they be awarded to groups, networks or alliances of NGOs, or to institutions of higher education.
Core Grants: are awarded as seed or operational funding to support grantees with missions and programmes that are aligned with OSISA aims and objectives.

How to Apply

Proposals should be sent by e-mail or fax at the address given on the website.

Eligible Countries

Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

For more information, please visit Call for Proposals.