The Fund’s purpose is to support local, national, and regional human rights groups and networks abroad in becoming stronger, more effective, and better funded. To accomplish this, the Fund for Global Human Rights focuses in five regions and has identified specific regional strategies designed to make the most impact with limited funds and resources (see links below for more information).
Grants are awarded through a competitive and transparent grants process. Funding decisions are advised by a number of sources: informal advisors, board members, and grantees themselves all play an essential role in identifying and recommending new and emerging human rights groups that may be eligible for grants. Primarily, our support comes in the form of grants. Since 2002, the Fund has awarded over $8 million to 200 human rights organizations in 14 countries.
The grants made by the Fund are relatively small (between $5-30,000), but are already making a demonstrable difference. These grants support campaigns that otherwise might falter for lack of needed resources, bring financial stability to groups, and help organizations take their work to the next level in terms of visibility and impact. For example:
- Women in India used a $25,000 grant to launch a campaign to protect the rights and dignity of rape victims and improve their prospects for justice.
- Indigenous people in rural, southern Mexico are exposing ongoing human rights abuses by military and police forces with grants from the Fund.
- In Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Fund’s grantees have brought education, social supports, health care and human rights training to former child soldiers.
- Fund grantee the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia led a successful campaign for women’s inheritance rights that secured adoption of the first law protecting those rights.
- Fund grantee Centro Mujeres won a major victory for women’s rights in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur when the state legislature passed reforms criminalizing domestic violence and marital rape and reducing the sentence for women who are found guilty of having illegal abortions from five years imprisonment to community service.
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» Find out more about our financial practices
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Read about our priorities and grants programs in the following countries: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Mexico, Guatemala, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.
Please note that we are no longer accepting proposals from organizations in Bangladesh.
