An interview with Jean-Ann Ndow on the importance of feminist funding and how Malala Fund is implementing this into our Girl Programme.
The future of Malala Fund’s Girl Programme is in the hands of young women. Solving the education crisis requires listening to young women, championing their ideas and supporting their strategies for change.
The Girl Programme features a fellowship programme that invests in local organisations and amplifies the voices of young women through Assembly. Built with flexibility in mind, the programme has three pillars currently, but it could evolve as girls provide their input. For example, Malala Fund fellows — a cohort of ten girls from Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Pakistan — helped identify and direct funding to feminist movements and women-led movements, groups and organisations.
“We believe our role is to provide the resources and tools required to let them lead,” says Jean-Ann Ndow, the Girl Programme Manager at Malala Fund. “But we’re on a continual journey to figure out how to do that in the most feminist, equitable way possible.”
Jean-Ann runs the fellowship programme, manages engagements with girl activists and oversees the programme’s grant portfolio. Ahead, she dives into what makes Malala Fund’s approach to designing the Girl Programme unique and the importance of feminist funding to securing lasting social justice change.
How would you define feminist funding?
Malala Fund knows that girls and young women are the experts on their lives, the challenges they face and are best placed to find solutions. We believe our role is to provide the resources and tools required to let them lead. But we’re on a continual journey to figure out how to do that in the most feminist, equitable way possible.
We understand that to be a feminist grantmaker requires us to move beyond only funding projects to provide core funding, including operational costs that enables groups and organisations to resource the work they need to do in contexts that are agile and changing. Women and girls around the world are organising and taking action in diverse ways. But many aren’t registered as official organisations and are operating in places that are hard to reach, which prevents them from receiving funds from donors and scaling their work.
Can you provide a more illustrative example of how this works practically? Is there an example from Malala Fund? If not, is there another organisation that does this well whose work has inspired our approach?
To ensure more unregistered feminist movements and collectives could secure the funding they needed when Malala Fund launched our Girl Programme, we launched our first ever open call application process in seven of our programme countries and asked that only girl or women-led groups apply. We simplified our application process and offered the option of submitting written or video responses in their language of choice. As a result, we received a diverse range of applications from groups and organisations that are working on the frontline to support girls and young women facing extremely challenging realities.
We were really inspired by organisations leading in this work like African Women Development Fund (AWDF), Madre and Purposeful and had the privilege of learning from them. I organised a series of learning sessions for their staff to teach our team about their approach to grantmaking and how we can better support girl and women-led organisations, movements and collectives. It challenged us to consider how we might navigate the process of funding unregistered groups and movements, support the safety of our partners, facilitate peer learning opportunities, build more participatory monitoring, evaluation and learning processes that focus less on extractive data and more on participatory tools and methods of data collection, co-creation of assessments and building learning that supports our partners to reflect on and improve their programming for girls. This is important because our role as a donor is to listen to our partners, work with them to strengthen their ability to make an impact, create space for peer learning and reflection and support them to navigate the challenges they encounter.
What measures were essential to Malala Fund designing this type of programming?
Before starting the design process, we wanted to speak with girls and young women from our programme countries. It was key to hear in girls’ own words what their greatest barriers to education are and what type of actions they and others in their community were taking to address these issues. We also wanted to understand the challenges they face in accessing the funding needed to do their work. The clearest takeaway: girls want us to fund them directly. Our team then sought the input of feminist activists and academics in our programme countries for more contextualisation. These conversations provided us with a stronger foundation from which to design our programme.
To make our grantmaking model more feminist, working with our grants team and in-country representatives was critical. It is a challenging process that requires collaboration, support and buy-in from leadership, as well as flexibility and open and honest conversations to design and build together. We had to work with fiscal sponsors and seek legal advice on how to support diverse partners. We arranged an open call for grants that we translated into seven languages to make it more accessible and invited partners to apply in writing or by sending us video applications. We also had to build a new, participatory grant application review and selection process with young women.
The Girl Programme at Malala Fund is built with flexibility in mind and continues to evolve. What do you think is among the biggest learnings you’ve taken away from leading these efforts?
Central to the Girl Programme is a commitment to co-creation of the programme with girls and young women. We consult girls at key stages of programme design and development and we hand over decision making power over to girls. It requires our team to approach this process with intentionality and trust. But we believe designing in this way is key to building a successful programme that actually meets girls’ needs and demands.
This process reinforced my beliefs that we must trust girls and young women as the experts on their lives and remain accountable to them in all the work we do with and for them. Listening to their stories and hearing their recommendations, I was challenged to be intentional about creating space and opportunities to hand power over to girls and young women to let them lead and make decisions that meaningfully shape and impact the Girl Programme.
Why do you feel feminist funding is a key part to accelerating progress for girls’ education?
Feminist funding that meets the resourcing needs of activists, groups, movements and organisations can better enable them to focus on addressing the root causes of gender inequality. These are many of the same issues that continue to keep millions of girls from learning.
What resources or tips would you recommend to other organisations interested in restructuring their grant-making to adopt a feminist, decolonial approach?
We did lots of reading and had many conversations in the process of building the feminist fund. If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend starting with:
To learn more about Malala Fund’s Girl Programme, visit malala.org/girl-programme.
