Call for Proposals: Advancing Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in Afghanistan

Deadline: 11-Dec-22

UN Women is currently accepting proposals to Advance Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in Afghanistan.

Through the provision of direct multi-year funding, this Call for Proposal responds to the need to strengthen and sustain women-led civil society organisations (CSO), to advance women’s rights in Afghanistan as well as build cohesive communities and address the root causes of social inequalities. CSOs implementing a range of demand-driven activities will be supported through two-year funding. In addition to direct financial support, each partner selected through the Call for Proposal will receive capacity strengthening and technical assistance.

The objective of this call for proposals is to support Afghan civil society organizations and their efforts towards advancing women’s rights and gender equality in Afghanistan, with a focus on small women-led and women’s rights civil society organizations.

Proposals should be needs-based, ethical, safe, and contextually appropriate and clearly dedicated to advancing women’s rights and gender equality in Afghanistan.

Focus Areas & Indicative Activities

• Proposals may focus on any of the following fourareas or a combination thereof (non-exhaustive list):
  • Area 1: Building social cohesion and peaceful communities
    • This area of work focuses on building socially cohesive and peaceful communities, as well as implementing initiatives that seek to address the root causes of social inequalities and conflict.
  • Indicative activities:
    • Engaging with local leaders – religious scholars, traditional and community leaders, elders, shuras, local CSOs, youth and women’s groupsand creating plans to address the needs of and improve the status of women and girls;
    • Training community leaders on skills needed to address and prevent conflict, including dispute resolution, interest-based negotiation, mediation, conflict early-warning and/or mitigation and addressing community level priorities and grievances;
    • Changing mindsets and addressing negative stereotypes by designing and implementing messaging campaigns (social media, radio, television) to address negative stereotypes and narratives that that perpetuate tensions between communities, particularly as they relate to women’s rights and gender equality;
    • Conducting dialogues between diverse groups to address shared issues or concerns with the broader aim of increasing interactions between groups and building relationships and trust;
    • Facilitating safe spaces for gender reflection in the communitythat aim to create local protection mechanisms and allies towards the promotion and protection of women and girls’human rights within the family and the community;
    • Increasing women’s participation in local/community decision making mechanisms and other community structures to create spaces for women’s participation,
  • Area 2: Monitoring and documenting the status of women and girls
    • This includes initiatives aiming at mapping, documenting and researching themes and issues related to the status of women/girls and gender equality.
  • Indicative activities:
    • Creating mechanisms to monitor the status of women and girls at the local level, including collecting data at the provincial level to document and improve understanding of gender equality dynamics;
    • Analyzing trends and creating reports on how to best enhance protection of women human rights defenders (WHRDs) in Afghanistan;
    • Analyzing trends at local/regional level, and producing reports and recommendations for key stakeholders in Afghanistan on how to best include and support women and girls that are the most left behind;
    • Undertaking consultations and/or listening mechanisms at the community level to understand the root causes of gender inequality and its impact on Afghanistan’s future.
  • Area 3: Building coalitions of women leaders across the country to advance women’s rights and gender equality priorities
    • This area of work seeks to build the influence of women leaders to advance women’s rights and gender equality in Afghanistan.
  • Indicative activities:
    • Building alliances amongst women leaders and/or organisations around shared values and/or issues to advance gender equality and women’s rights;
    • Strengthening connections of women across the country to discuss shared challenges and solutions to advance women’s rights and gender equality;
    • Elevating and amplifying the priorities and policy recommendations of women leadersand organizations inside the country to advance the status of women and gender equalitynationally and globally – virtually or otherwise;
    • Developing and implementing joint policy-advocacy approaches to influence national, regional and nationalstakeholders to put women’s rights and gender equality at the centre of their efforts;
    • Running problem-solving workshops to support women leaders and organisations to move from problem-identification to developing practical solutions and policy options to address identified challenges;
    • Training and/or mentorship for women and girls on coalition-building, organizing and advocacy, including in safe use of virtual campaigning and in-person convenings;
  • Area 4: Strengthening the capacity of women-led organisations and leaders
    • This area of work seeks to strengthen the capacity of women leaders and organisations to advance their objectives, organisations, and strategies.
  • Indicative activities:
    • Building comprehensive capacity development programmes that strengthen the institutional foundation of women’s organisations, including ability to manage donor-funded initiatives (grant-writing, report-writing, monitoring and evaluation), and technical capacity related to programming areas;
    • Designing and implementing accompaniment and mentorship programmes to support new and emerging women’s organisations and leaders;
    • Improvingupgrading organizational systems and processes through the purchase of and training in the use of advancedautomated systems that will result in efficiency gains and modernize communications and administration, both remote and local;
    • Establishing or strengthening data monitoring systems to track the resourcing for women-led organizations.

Funding Information

• The budget range for this proposal should beUSD 100,000.00 to USD 200,000.00).

Competencies

• Demonstrated expertise in women’s rights and gender equality in Afghanistan;
• Demonstrated experience in one of the outlined workstream areas;
• Experience in implementing adaptive programming that embeds conflict and gender sensitive approaches;
• Ability to work across Afghanistan’s diversity, including women from diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs, ages, geographies, abilities;
• Capacity to deliver expected results in current context (governance and management competencies, and financial and administrative competency);
• Relevance of the mandate and the role of the organization to implement expected results and to contribute to Relevance of the mandate and the role of the organization to implement expected results and to contribute to the sustainability of said results;

UN Women will prioritize applications:

• Submitted by civil society organizations legally established and operating in Afghanistan;
• Submitted by small women-led and/or women’s rights organizations;
• Submitted by Afghan organizations withproven expertise and experiencein advancing women’s rights and promoting gender equality in Afghanistan;
• Conceptualized, developed, and fully implemented by the applicant, in line with their assessments of the needs of targeted primary beneficiaries, and aligned to one of the four programmatic streams outlined in this Call for Proposals;
• Directly benefitting Afghan women and girls, with an emphasison marginalized women and girls at the intersectionof multiple forms of discrimination (i.e. rural women and girls, women and girls with disabilities, women-headed households, women and girls living in extreme poverty, etc.).

Ineligible

• The following are NOT eligible to apply to this Call for Proposals:
  • The applicant does not have legal status in Afghanistan;
  • The applicant is on the Consolidated UN Security Council Sanctions list;
  • The applicant is being investigated for fraud, corruption, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation or other wrongdoing;
  • The applicant has funding received from UN Women entirely or partly written off by UN Women;
  • The applicant is a government agency or institution, UN agency, private individuals, or a private sector entity.

For more information, visit https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/programme-implementation/2022/11/unw-ap-afg-cfp-2022-005-advancing-womens-rights-and-gender-equality-in-afghanistan