What does it mean for international NGOs to truly shift power? At Oxfam, we think our fund for grassroots women’s rights organisations, which is founded on the principle that our partners should decide what to spend money on, holds some of the answers. Oxfam GB CEO Dr Halima Begum writes here about a project that has just won two 2025 Charity Awards.

What would happen if large international NGOs genuinely stepped back and gave grassroots and more local partners the space and resources to design and lead their own projects? What if we just scrapped most of the usual rules and form-filling around our grants? What if the primary role of aid workers was not to monitor partners but to resource, support and encourage?
The Women’s Rights Fund is a project that is leading the way in answering these questions – and doing things differently when it comes to international NGOs such as Oxfam partnering with local organisations. Today, it supports 18 grassroots women’s rights organisations across Lebanon, Nepal, Kenya and the Occupied Palestinian Territory with flexible, multi-year funding to invest in their own priorities. Crucially, decisions on how to spend funding are made entirely by our partners themselves.
“Having a fund that allows you to focus on your priorities has been a game changer,” says Bina Maseno, founder of Badili Africa, a Kenyan women’s rights organisation dedicated to young women’s political engagement and feminising political spaces. It also gives women and communities the agency and flexibility they have long been demanding. As Buthaina Sobh, founder of Gaza-based partner WEFAQ Society for Woman and Child Care says: “For us… this is the first flexible funding we implemented, and we appreciate the space… to set our agenda and to fund what we see as a priority… I keep talking about this project and the importance of other INGOs to follow by example!”. (WEFAQ has continued working in the south of Gaza through the extraordinarily difficult context of the war).

The Women’s Rights Fund marks a deliberate commitment by Oxfam to test and learn how to devolve more resources and power to national organisations, challenge our own systems and become a better partner. It was inspired by Oxfam’s longstanding work with women’s rights organisations around the world, and by our 2019 research, A Leap of Faith. The focus on women’s rights organisations, especially small women’s rights organisations, has been driven by a funding system that has historically ignored them, or put up too many barriers to support, with the result that around the world, women’s rights organisations remain severely under-funded.
A platform where women’s organisations can flourish
All the partners are grassroots organisations supporting women, girls and whole communities in everything from emergency aid, to access to healthcare, to support to survivors of violence and more. The fund is also committed to supporting its member organisations to become more sustainable, through support where partners want it, on areas including fundraising, budgeting and strategic planning.
The fund launched in 2020 and in its first three years, our partners succeeded in trebling the number of people they served in their communities, on average, and doubling their income. In emergency settings in particular, the ability to quickly redirect funds to emerging needs, unimpeded by grant conditions that restrict partners’ work, has been, as a Gaza partner organisation put it, ”a lifeline”.
In it for the long-term
A critical aspect of the way the fund works is that we offer three-year, sustained support. Women’s rights organisations too often have to work to short grant timeframes to solve complex problems or create systemic change, work to unrealistic targets and get forced into short-term thinking.
Grant stability enables women’s rights organisations to take a longer-term approach, allowing them to make proper strategic plans and investments, retain and invest in staff, build expertise and networks to sustain and grow their work and increase their impact.
What does the future hold?
Now we want to build on the success of the Women’s Rights Fund to make much more impact for small organisations supporting women and girls across the globe.
Our first priority is to increase the number of partners in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Kenya, Lebanon and Nepal. We then plan to expand to 10 countries, increasing the number of organisations we support from 18 to 70 per year, to begin with.
We believe the Women’s Rights Fund can make an important contribution to how international NGOs work with local communities in the 21st century. After all, if a large, 83-year-old international NGO like Oxfam can start to make the fundamental change needed to become a better partner, surely others can too?
Vital funding raised by donors, including players of People’s Postcode Lottery (awarded by Postcode International Trust) helps to support Oxfam and our partners’ work through the Women’s Rights Fund. Find out more about the Women’s Rights Fund and our partners: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/women-equality/womens-rights-fund/
At last night’s Charity Awards, Oxfam’s Women’s Rights Fund won both in the international aid and development category and the overall award for excellence, chosen from the ten category winners. More on the awards below.
The Charity Awards
Now in its 25th year, the Charity Awards continues to recognise innovative charities that exemplify best practices and deliver sustainable benefits to communities and society.
Chaired by Chris Sherwood, an independent judging panel of professionals who have devoted enormous amounts of energy and dedication to the sector themselves, provide expert scrutiny to ensure The Charity Awards winners really deserve the accolade. They take a range of attributes – our ‘Hallmarks of Excellence’ – into account.
The Charity Awards is a year-round programme that uses Civil Society Media’s portfolio of magazines, reports, events and websites to celebrate and highlight best practice across the sector.
Awards are given out in ten categories and an overall winner is chosen from the winners in each category. The awards have been designed so that any charity – regardless of their size, location or cause – can enter their project and be in with a chance of winning.