Donor Dialogue at the International AIDS Conference
August 15, 2006 | Toronto, Canada
"I'm tired of hearing big donors say that ‘community-based organizations are doing great work, but we just can't get our money to them’. We need to get mechanisms to channel funding to the grassroots level in place now!" -Jen Astone, Firelight Foundation
"It's a myth that grassroots women's organizations don't deliver, because they do." -Alexis MacDonald, Stephen Lewis Foundation
Today in the Community Dialogue Space in the Global Village of the International AIDS Conference, GROOTS International and the Huairou Commission convened a unique and groundbreaking dialogue between grassroots practitioners and donor allies. The Donor Dialogue discussed the challenges and benefits of working directly with grassroots organizations and generated will to convene a a coalition of grassroots and donor organizations to advocate with major funding institutions for greater recognition and support to go toward grassroots organizations. The proposed coalition would target institutions such as the World Bank, Global Fund for AIDS, UNAIDS and UNDP for greater involvement of grassroots practitioners in their processes and for more direct, sustained funding to grassroots organizations. It is widely accepted that such grassroots organizations provide the major response to HIV/AIDS in the poorest, most marginalized affected communities.
The Dialogue began with grassroots women - home-based caregivers and community organizers - laying out the issues and the context in which they work. It emerged clearly that women shoulder a huge burden of care due to HIV/AIDS, almost entirely without resources or recognition. Rose Omia from the Mathare Mother's Development Center said, "We have all the knowledge and expertise on the ground. But big donors come in and bring their experts to do research and gather data. Why don't they find a way to do it differently? By building the capacity of grassroots women and supporting us?"
Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, founder and director of the African Women's Development Fund clearly laid out the major problem with the dominant mode of funding - the strengths of women’s work are not only going unrecognized in funding processes, but are actually being undermined. Grassroots women's strengths lie in their collective approach, in their movement building, in their holistic responses. "People do not live their lives in boxes that can be checked off," she said. And yet most major donors come into communities, select the leaders they want to work with rather than supporting communities to select their own leaders, fund programs rather than providing core support, and fund in cycles that are 5 years at the longest. As Esther Mwaura-Muiru of GROOTS Kenya put it, "A movement cannot be built in five years."
For the Dialogue, GROOTS International and the Huairou Commission pulled together a strong panel of donor-partners that included Alexis MacDonald of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, Suneeta Dahr of the UNIFEM Trust Fund, Julia Greenberg of American Jewish World Service, Muadi Mukenge of the Global Fund for Women and Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi of the African Women's Development Fund. Each of these women is committed to doing business differently and supporting grassroots organizations’ unique, holistic ways of working.
The Dialogue was attended by conference participants as well as institutional representatives including Nadeem Mohammad of the World Bank MAP.
For more information, contact:
Shannon Hayes: shannon.hayes@huairou.org
