Women's Forum on Financing for Gender Equality

• The Forum took place on 10 July 2015 in Addis Ababa and convened feminists, grassroots women, gender advocates, academics and representatives of women’s rights organizations/networks with specific inputs by UN representatives and other policy makers.
• The objectives of the Women's Forum were to: share information on the state of play in the latest FfD negotiations; jointly analyze the FfD panorama and follow-up; build a common women’s rights positioning; and strategize on how to meaningfully and substantively engage from a feminist perspective at the Addis FfD Conference.
• The Women's Forum was organized by the Women's Working Group on FfD, in collaboration with FEMNET, African Women's Development Fund (AWDF) and the Post 2015 Women's Coalition with support from UN Women.
• Read the Women's Working Group reaction to the Addis Ababa Action Agenda

CSO FfD Forum

• The CSO FfD Forum took place in Addis Ababa on 11-12 July 2015 and aimed to: inform participating CSOs on the state of play of the official process and coordinate civil society participation in the 3rd FfD Conference; develop a collective CSO Forum Declaration as well as the CSO messages for the FfD Conference Roundtables, the CSO FfD Group-led side events and any other opportunities that might emerge; and plan and organize future areas of CSO engagement on Financing for Development, beyond the 3rd FfD Conference.
• Read the Declaration from the Addis Ababa Civil Society Forum on Financing for Development
• For more information, please visit the CSO FfD Group's website or contact the Addis Ababa CSO Coordinating Group (addiscoordinatinggroup@gmail.com).

The Third UN International Conference on Financing for Development

• The third Conference on Financing For Development took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 13-16 July 2015 and focused on: assessing the progress made in the implementation of the 2002 Monterrey Consensus and the 2008 Doha Declaration; addressing new and emerging issues, including in the context of the recent multilateral efforts to promote international development cooperation. Taking into account: the current evolving development cooperation landscape; the interrelationship of all sources of development finance; the synergies between financing objectives across the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental); and the need to support the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015; and reinvigorating and strengthening the financing for development follow-up process.
• The Addis Ababa Action Agenda was adopted on 15 July 2015 by Heads of State, Governments and High Representatives at the UN.
• The feeling however from developing countries, CSOs and more specifically women's organisations was that the Addis Ababa Action Agenda failed to meet the target. The Women's Working Group expressed its strong disappointment and demanded structural changes in the global economic governance and development architecture. Read their reaction to the outcome document. Hundreds of civil society organizations and networks from around the world also expressed deep concerns and reservations. Read their response to the outcome document.

7 Women Human Rights Defenders from across the South and Southeast Asian region are honored in this year’s Online Tribute. These defenders have made key contributions to advancing human and women’s rights, indigenous people’s rights, and the right to education. These WHRDs were lawyers, women’s rights activists, scholars, and politicians. Please join AWID in commemorating t their work and legacy by sharing the memes below with your colleagues, networks and friends and by using the hashtags #WHRDTribute and #16Days. 

Please click on each image below to see a larger version and download as a file

See Our 2015 WHRD Tribute

There are many reasons why your response to the WITM survey matters. The survey offers the opportunity to share your lived experience of mobilizing funding to support your organizing; claim your power as an expert on how money moves and who it reaches; and contribute to collective and consistent advocacy to funders moving more and better funding. Over the last two decades, AWID’s WITM research has proven to be a key resource for activists and funders. We wholeheartedly invite you to join us in its third iteration to highlight the actual state of resourcing, challenge false solutions, and point out how funding must change for movements to thrive and meet the complex challenges of our times.

El tema del 14° Foro Internacional de AWID es «Realidades feministas: nuestro poder en acción».

Entendemos las realidades feministas como los diferentes modos de existir y ser que nos muestran lo que es posible, a pesar de los sistemas de poder dominantes, y en desafío y resistencia contra ellos. Entendemos estas realidades feministas como recuperaciones y corporizaciones de esperanza y poder, multidimensionales, dinámicas, y arraigadas en contextos y momentos históricos específicos.

Leer más sobre las realidades feministas

Before starting the WITM research methodology, it is important you prepare the background and know what to expect.

Capacity

With AWID’s WITM research methodology, we recommend that you first review the entire toolkit.

While this toolkit is designed to democratize WITM research, there are capacity constraints related to resources and research experience that may affect your organization’s ability use this methodology.

Use the “Ready to Go?” Worksheet to assess your readiness to begin your own WITM research. The more questions you can answer on this worksheet, the more prepared you are to undertake your research.

Trust

Before beginning any research, we recommend that you assess your organization’s connections and trust within your community.

In many contexts, organizations may be hesitant to openly share financial data with others for reasons ranging from concerns about how the information will be used, to fear of funding competition and anxiety over increasing government restrictions on civil society organizations.

As you build relationships and conduct soft outreach in the lead-up to launching your research, ensuring that your objectives are clear will be useful in creating trust. Transparency will allow participants to understand why you are collecting the data and how it will benefit the entire community.

We highly recommend that you ensure data is collected confidentially and shared anonymously. By doing so, participants will be more comfortable sharing sensitive information with you. 

First step

1. Gather your resources

We also recommend referring to our “Ready to Go?” Worksheet to assess your own progress.

First step

1. Gather your resources

Ready to Go? Worksheet

Download the toolkit in PDF

Quels sont les Objectifs de Nous Sommes la Solution?

No. Valoramos muchísimo su trabajo, pero no estamos buscando respuestas de fondos de mujeres/feministas por el momento. Alentamos a compartir la encuesta con sus socios beneficiarios y con sus redes feministas.

Siempre hemos trabajado para garantizar que nuestros Foros sean desarrollados conjuntamente con nuestrxs afiliadxs, los movimientos, y nuestros colectivos prioritarios.

Para el Foro 2020 queremos profundizar y fortalecer este espíritu y esta práctica de creación conjunta y colaboración. También reconocemos la necesidad de mejorar el equilibrio entre la inclusión de muchas voces y experiencias y el espacio para que lxs participantes y el equipo respiren, se tomen una pausa, y disfruten de un poco de tiempo de inactividad.

Este Foro será diferente en cuanto a que:

• Tendremos muchas menos actividades organizadas, porque queremos que la gente tenga tiempo para relacionarse y hablar entre sí, experimentar, procesar, etc. Es fundamental que sepas que puedes venir al Foro, participar y ser muy activx, y no facilitar ninguna actividad organizada (o «sesión»).
• Tendremos Espacios Abiertos (al menos una tarde entera sin ninguna actividad organizada), y también espacios físicos disponibles durante todo el Foro para que la gente organice sus propias reuniones.
• Tendremos un Comité de Contenido y Metodología compuesto por feministas de distintas regiones con experiencia en metodologías participativas, para apoyar al equipo de AWID y a quienes lideren actividades en el Foro en el uso de formatos creativos e interesantes para las actividades del Foro.

This section will guide you on how to ensure your research findings are representative and reliable.

In this section:

• Collect your data
  1. Before launch
  2. Launch
  3. During launch
• Prepare your data for analysis
  1. Clean your data
  2. Code open-ended responses
  3. Remove unecessary data
  4. Make it safe
• Create your topline report
• Analyze your data
  1. Statistical programs
  2. Suggested points for analysis

Collect your data

1. Before launch

• First determine the best way to reach your survey population.
  For example, if you want to focus on indigenous women’s rights organizers, do you know who the key networks are? Do you have contacts there, people who can introduce you to these organizations or ways of reaching them?
• Determine if your key population can be easily reached with an online survey, if you need to focus on paper survey distribution and collection or a mix of both. This decision is very important to ensure accessibility and inclusiveness.
• Be prepared! Prior to advertizing, create a list of online spaces where you can promote your survey.
  If you are distributing paper versions, create a list of events, spaces and methods for distributing and collecting results.
• Plan your timeline in advance, so you can avoid launching your survey during major holidays or long vacation periods.
• Make it easy for your advisors and partners to advertize the survey – offer them pre-written Twitter, Facebook and email messages that they can copy and paste.

2. Launch

• Send the link to the survey via email through your organization’s email databases.
• Advertize on your organization’s social media. Similar to your newsletter, you can regularly advertize the survey while it is open.
• If your organization is hosting events that reach members of your survey population, this is a good space to advertize the survey and distribute paper versions as needed.
• Invite your advisors to promote the survey with their email lists and ask them to copy you so you are aware of their promotional messages. Remember to send them follow-up reminders if they’ve agreed to disseminate.
• Approach funders to share your survey with their grantees. It is in their interest that their constituencies respond to a survey that will improve their own work in the field.

3. During launch

• Keep the survey open for a minimum of four weeks to ensure everyone has time to take it and you have time to widely advertize it.
• Send reminders through your email databases and your partners databases asking people to participate in the survey. To avoid irritating recipients with too many emails, we recommend sending two additional reminder emails: one at  midway point while your survey is open and another a week before your survey closes.
• As part of your outreach, remember to state that you are only collecting one response per organization. This will make cleaning your data much easier when you are preparing it for analysis.
• Save an extra week! Halfway through the open window for survey taking, check your data set. How have you done so far? Run initial numbers to see how many groups have responded, from which locations, etc. If you see gaps, reach out to those specific populations. Also, consider extending your deadline by a week – if you do so, include this extension deadline in one of your reminder emails, informing people know there is more time to complete the survey. Many answers tend to come in during the last week of the survey or after the extended deadline.

If you also plan to collect data from applications sent to grant-making institutions, this is a good time to reach out them.

When collecting this data, consider what type of applications you would like to review. Your research framing will guide you in determining this.

Also, it may be unnecessary to see every application sent to the organization – instead, it will be more useful and efficient to review only eligible applications (regardless of whether they were funded).

You can also ask grant-making institutions to share their data with you.

See a sample letter to send to grant-making institutions

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Prepare your data for analysis

Your survey has closed and now you have all this information! Now you need to ensure your data is as accurate as possible.

Depending on your sample size and amount of completed surveys, this step can be lengthy. Tapping into a strong pool of detail-oriented staff will speed up the process and ensure greater accuracy at this stage.

Also, along with your surveys, you may have collected data from applications sent to grant-making institutions. Use these same steps to sort that data as well. Do not get discouraged if you cannot compare the two data sets! Funders collect different information from what you collected in the surveys. In your final research report and products, you can analyze and present the datasets (survey versus grant-making institution data) separately.

1. Clean your data

• Resolve and remove duplications: If there is more than one completed survey for one organization, reach out to the organization and determine which one is the most accurate.
• Remove ineligible responses: Go through each completed survey and remove any responses that did not properly answer the question. Replace it with “null”, thus keeping it out of your analysis.
• Consistently format numerical data: For example, you may remove commas, decimals and dollar signs from numerical responses. Financial figures provided in different currencies may need to be converted.

2. Code open-ended responses

There are two styles of open-ended responses that require coding.

Questions with open-ended responses

For these questions, you will need to code responses in order to track trends.

Some challenges you will face with this is:

1. People will not use the exact same words to describe similar responses
2. Surveys with multiple language options will require translation and then coding
3. Staff capacity to review and code each open-ended response.

If using more than one staff member to review and code, you will need to ensure consistency of coding. Thus, this is why we recommend limiting your open-ended questions and as specific as possible for open-ended questions you do ask. 

For example, if you had the open-ended question “What specific challenges did you face in fundraising this year?” and some common responses cite “lack of staff,” or “economic recession,” you will need to code each of those responses so you can analyze how many participants are responding in a similar way.

For closed-end questions

If you provided the participant with the option of elaborating on their response, you will also need to “up-code” these responses.

For several questions in the survey, you may have offered the option of selecting the category “Other” With “Other” options, it is common to offer a field in which the participant can elaborate.

You will need to “up-code” such responses by either:

• Converting open-ended responses to the correct existing categories (this is known as “up-coding”). As a simple example, consider your survey asks participants “what is your favorite color?” and you offer the options “blue,” “green,” and “other.” There may be some participants that choose “other” and in their explanation they write “the color of the sky is my favorite color.” You would then “up-code” answers like these to the correct category, in this case, the category “blue.”
• Creating a new category if there are several “others” that have a common theme. (This is similar to coding the first type of open-ended responses). Consider the previous example question of favorite color. Perhaps many participants chose “other” and then wrote “red” is their favorite. In this case, you would create a new category of “red” to track all responses that answered “red.”
• Removing “others” that do not fit any existing or newly created categories.

3. Remove unecessary data

Analyze the frequency of the results

For each quantitative question, you can decide whether you should remove the top or bottom 5% or 1% to prevent outliers* from skewing your results. You can also address the skewing effect of outliers by using median average rather than the mean average. Calculate the median by sorting responses in order, and selecting the number in the middle. However, keep in mind that you may still find outlier data useful. It will give you an idea of the range and diversity of your survey participants and you may want to do case studies on the outliers.

* An outlier is a data point that is much bigger or much smaller than the majority of data points. For example, imagine you live in a middle-class neighborhood with one billionaire. You decide that you want to learn what the range of income is for middle-class families in your neighborhood. In order to do so, you must remove the billionaire income from your dataset, as it is an outlier. Otherwise, your mean middle-class income will seem much higher than it really is.

Remove the entire survey for participants who do not fit your target population. Generally you can recognize this by the organizations’ names or through their responses to qualitative questions.

4. Make it safe

To ensure confidentiality of the information shared by respondents, at this stage you can replace organization names with a new set of ID numbers and save the coding, matching names with IDs in a separate file.

With your team, determine how the coding file and data should be stored and protected.

For example, will all data be stored on a password-protected computer or server that only the research team can access?

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Create your topline report

A topline report will list every question that was asked in your survey, with the response percentages listed under each question. This presents the collective results of all individual responses. 

Tips:

• Consistency is important: the same rules should be applied to every outlier when determining if it should stay or be removed from the dataset.
• For all open (“other”) responses that are up-coded, ensure the coding matches. Appoint a dedicated point person to randomly check codes for consistency and reliability and recode if necessary.
• If possible, try to ensure that you can work at least in a team of two, so that there is always someone to check your work.

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Analyze your data

Now that your data is clean and sorted, what does it all mean? This is the fun part where you begin to analyze for trends.

Are there prominent types of funders (government versus corporate)? Are there regions that receive more funding? Your data will reveal some interesting information.

1. Statistical programs

• Smaller samples (under 150 responses) may be done in-house using an Excel spreadsheet.

• Larger samples (above 150 responses) may be done in-house using Excel if your analysis will be limited to tallying overall responses, simple averages or other simple analysis.

• If you plan to do more advanced analysis, such as multivariate analysis, then we recommend using statistical software such as SPSS, Stata or R.
  NOTE: SPSS and Stata are expensive whereas R is free.
  All three types of software require staff knowledge and are not easy to learn quickly.

Try searching for interns or temporary staff from local universities. Many students must learn statistical analysis as part of their coursework and may have free access to SPSS or Stata software through their university. They may also be knowledgeable in R, which is free to download and use.

2. Suggested points for analysis

• Analysis of collective budget sizes
• Analysis of budget sizes by region or type of organization
• Most common funders
• Total amount of all funding reported
• Total percentages of type of funding (corporate, government, etc)
• Most funded issues/populations
• Changes over time in any of these results.

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Previous step

3. Design your survey

Next step

5. Conduct interviews

Estimated time:

• 2 - 3 months

People needed:

• 1 or more research person(s)
• Translator(s), if offering survey in multiple languages
• 1 or more person(s) to assist with publicizing survey to target population
• 1 or more data analysis person(s)

Resources needed:

• List of desired advisors: organizations, donors, and activists
• Optional: an incentive prize to persuade people to complete your survey
• Optional: an incentive for your advisors

Resources available:

Survey platforms:

• Survey Monkey
• Survey Gizmo (Converts to SPSS for analysis very easily)

Examples:
• 2011 WITM Global Survey
• Sample of WITM Global Survey
• Sample letter to grantmakers requesting access to databases

Visualising Information for Advocacy:
• Cleaning Data Tools
• Tools to present your data in compelling ways
• Tutorial: Gentle Introduction to Cleaning Data

Previous step

3. Design your survey

Next step

5. Conduct interviews

Ready to Go? Worksheet

Download the toolkit in PDF

“It’s the indigenous knowledge and the practices that have always supported food sovereignty and this knowhow is in the hands of the women … Ecofeminism for me is the respect for all that we have around us.”

Mariama Sonko
Interview to The Guardian

Oui, l’enquête est accessible depuis les téléphones intelligents.

Por favor consulta la página «Financiamiento» para obtener algunas ideas sobre cómo puedes financiar tu participación en el próximo Foro. Esto incluye el limitado apoyo que AWID podrá brindar.