Coaliția Națională Viața Fără Violență în Familie

MD 2012, Chișinău, Republica Moldova

Str. Armenească 27/10
Tel/Fax: (+373) 69 253 558
Email: secretariat.coalitie@gmail.com

The quick assesment of the National Coalition “Life without violence” regarding the women,
peace and security cooperation and funding framework in Moldova in the context of war in
Ukraine and refugee crisis

The incorporation of feminist expertise, best practices and lessons learnt, in the WPS agenda and
conflict response, is essential for an effective response and for the foundation of any post-war and
peacebuilding efforts. The mentioned aspects are based on the experience of the international
feminist and women’s rights organizations with extensive experience in war and conflict situations,
partners and colleagues of the Coalition, as well as observations, expertise and practice of local
feminist and women organization of the members of the Coalition and not only.

Research has shown that only 1% of all gender focused aid reaches feminist and women’s rights
movements, the core drivers of lasting change. This often happens not due to lack of best intentions,
but due to funding modalities and designs of calls and programmes that de-facto exclude women’s
rights organisations.

Some of the challenges we have identified which include:

• Lack of a clear, transparent and understandable and accessible mechanism of funding
for local women's organizations, initiative groups and activists to manage the refugee crisis
and to continue to provide support to local women, victims of violence. A considerable
number of the grassroots oorganizations did not know what funds are available, how they
can be accessed, etc. The activities and efforts to support refugees have been made on the
basis of small, rapid and flexible grants provided only by some donors or organizations or
on the basis of humanitarian local and international aid.

• The possibility for international organisations to apply with local partners is an

insufficient solution. As is also the case in other regions and war situations, it leads to
Moldavian women-led organisations being approached by INGOs they have never heard of,
without sufficient time to build a relationship, develop trust, and assess whether this is a
viable partnership for them or they do not have a women based approach. While INGOs
might move much faster to apply for funding, they are not nearly as fast with their response
on the ground, especially in the contexts which are new to them, and rely heavily on the
knowledge, capacities and connections of local women's rights organisations. However, top-
down initiatives, where the expertise of local women’s rights organisations is reduced to the
“implementer” role, instead of conceptual and political leadership, miss the objective.
Further, INGOs tend to seek partnerships with the same local groups, which creates
unhelpful divisions within local movements, with some organisations receiving more
funding than they can sustainably absorb while others remain critically under-funded. While
intermediary models can be useful under some circumstances, it is critical that funding
also be directly available to local women-led organisations, especially in a context of
crisis because they are best placed to serve their community members rapidly and
effectively

• The minimum budget limit usually is very high that excludes the vast majority of
moldavian feminist and women’s rights organizations from applying, as absorbing funds this
large is not strategic or even impossible for most of these groups. According to the latest
analysis by AWID based on the data from Global Fund For Women, between 2015 and 2019,
 57% of feminist organizations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia had their annual budgets
at 30,000 USD or less and just 1% reported to exceed 500,000 USD.

• The rush to provide and absorb financial resources get out of side nuanced issues such
as the peacebuilding process at the community level, differences of opinion that create
tensions, cases of abuse, humiliations towards women refugees. At the same time, some
issues and challenges were not addressed in a sufficient way,
• The requirements of visibility and communication, such as having pictures of women
refugees or women organizations posing with food, have to consider the vulnerability of
women and the power position of those who offer the humanitarian support;

• The project-based approach and directions determined exclusively by donors or in

bilateral formats between donors and big organization followed by sub granting of small
organizations determines organizations to run after projects in order to survive, to comply
with the conditions of donors and not the real needs of the people they work with and to
create services that remain undercover and underfund after the end of the project.

Here are our some recommendations:

• First and foremost, small and medium size grants should be made available, directly
available to women’s rights organisations of different sizes, because they all are an
essential part of the civil society ecosystem enabling frontline response and any future
peacebuilding effort.
• Flexible core funding, with a flexible outcomes framework, must be provided, not just as
an exception but as an acknowledgement that any effective response to the war and refugee
crisis. Rigid outcomes frameworks are counterproductive and harmful.
• To recognize and prioritize the involvement and leadership of women and consider local
expertise and practice of women's organizations, the specifics of working with victims of
violence, and let the local organizations to lead in decision-making at all levels around the
planning, delivery, and other management of humanitarian assistance;
• To consider and understand the sensitive to conflicts, regional and local context where
organizations work; there are divergent opinions and tensions between the local population,
regarding the war with geopolitical nuance and women's organizations have to keep
neutrality and work on community peacebuilding and integration, a process that needs time
collective strategizing and mobilizing and support;
• The time-frame must be extended to allow more adequate time for emergency response,
mid- and long-term collective strategizing processes, to provide time for women's
organizations to breathe, to re-organize the organizations and the communities.
• A transparent monitoring mechanism must be set up to monitor the distribution of funds
and ensure they directly reach feminist, women’s rights and gender justice organisations in
their diversity, with disaggregated data on the reach of excluded groups and marginalised
communities,
• Support on the donor side should be made available for women's rights organisations to
help them meet the requirements for funding.

We welcome a dialogue and and offer our support in organising it together with organisations and
experts with extensive experience of directly resourcing and analysing funding patterns.

Respectfully,
On the behalf of the the National Coalition “Life without violence”
Coordinator,
Veronica Teleuca