Deadline: Ongoing
As a Women’s Fund, Urgent Action Fund (UAF) Africa is committed to supporting the resilience and wellbeing of African women’s human rights defenders (AWHRDS) to think through and implement collective care and healing practices.
The Fund is prioritizing collective care and healing as a direct and structured response to the collective distress that women and gender nonconforming communities face, which are caused by persistent forms of exclusion, violence and marginalization. The Fund’s support will go towards responding to the moment of crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The impact of the pandemic on Africa is uncertain as it has created an unprecedented situation that constantly evolves. What is clear, however, is that state-sanctioned measures to curb the spread of the disease have had a disproportionate impact on the health and wellbeing of women and gender non-conforming communities. The pandemic is a multidimensional crisis that has had adverse effects on prevailing economic, health and social care systems.
The crisis has further resulted in the widening and deepening of existing socio-economic fault lines and inequalities for disadvantaged communities along the lines of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and other social divisions in society. Furthermore, it is in these gaps that communities face considerable lack of opportunities to access care a well as wellbeing support for themselves as individuals and communities.
Areas
UAF-Africa is committed to providing support towards collective care and healing in the following areas:
- Mental health, counselling and provision of emergency kits with a priority to women, transgender and gender non-conforming people and their families.
- Responses that promote the wellness, healing and community care initiatives in times of social distancing.
- Small scale studies/research, information gathering, and documentation (through film, art, reports, etc.) of the approaches of the African women’s movement to collective care, healing and resilience building work.
- Feminist, intersectional and virtual-based responses to the challenges facing women and gender non-conforming people as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- COVID-19 collective care and healing campaigns.
- COVID-19 awareness initiatives in local languages through community radio and other relevant platforms.
Funding Information
- The Rapid Response Grants award up to $ 8000 to support the above mentioned work.
For more information, visit https://www.uaf-africa.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PDF-COVID-19-PANDEMIC.pdf
