Canada announces support to small and medium organizations for innovative projects as part of the Feminist International Assistance Policy

Over the next five years (fiscal years 2019-2020 to 2023-2024) $34.5 million of the initiative will be directed to the following 21 projects to foster new and diverse partnerships with Canadian SMOs in international assistance efforts.

160 Girls Police Enablement Scale Up - Ending Impunity for Child Rape
Implementing partner: the equality effect - e²
Funding: $2 million over three years

This project seeks to end impunity for child rape in Kenya by improving child rape investigations by police officers and improving access to justice for victims. It will train Kenya’s 80,000 police officers and create deterrence through local and national public legal education campaigns. 

Babanayaa Women and Girls project
Implementing partner: Ghana Rural Integrated Development
Funding: $1.338 million over four years

This project will improve the well-being of women and girls in 30 rural communities in Ghana’s northern and Brong Ahafo regions. It will support women’s increased participation in sustainable, productive work and improved participation in equitable household and community decision making. The project will support young women’s access to late secondary and post-secondary education, found to be the single best means of increasing options for their participation in paid employment. It will also increase the abilities of women and responsibility bearers to protect women’s rights and well-being.

Building Community Resilience to Climate Change in Senegal
Implementing partner: Jane Goodall Institute of Canada
Funding: $2 million over five years

The project will improve the resilience of rural communities to climate change, especially for poor women in the Kedougou region of Senegal by increasing farmers’ practice of gender-sensitive climate-smart agriculture with the production and processing of an indigenous drought-resistant crop, fonio (Digitaria exilis); increasing women’s role in decision making for sustainable livelihoods, including the production of biomass briquettes as an alternative fuel source to coal and charcoal; and adopting forest-protection practices by local government and community partners in ecologically vulnerable areas.

C.R.E.C.E. Mujer - Colombia
Implementing partner: École des entrepreneurs du Québec [school of entrepreneurs of Quebec]
Funding: $1.993 million over three years

The project will increase the economic empowerment of women in the Sucre region of Colombia by increasing women’s participation in economic decision making, strengthening their entrepreneurial skills and increasing their opportunities for economic empowerment. This will be achieved by strengthening institutions supporting business creation and advancing women's skills in the creation and growth of Small and Medium Enterprises.

Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Artisanal Mining
Implementing partner: IMPACT - Transforming Natural Resource Management
Funding: $2 million over three years

This project will support women working in the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector to tackle the barriers that women face with respect to achieving full gender equality in this sector, including ensuring laws, policies, regulations and practices affecting the ASM sector serve to improve women’s security and reduce gender inequality; increasing the economic benefits that women derive from ASM; and building the capacity of women to become environmental stewards in ASM.

Gender Equity in Teacher Training to Improve Girls’ Education in Afghanistan
Organization: Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan
Funding: $1.215 million over four years

This project will improve educational outcomes for Afghan children, especially girls, in catchment-area schools around select teacher training colleges (TTCs) of Kabul, Kandahar and Nangarhar. This project will improve gender responsiveness of leadership at select TTCs and will increase the supply of teachers, particularly female teachers, who apply gender-responsive pedagogies.

Gender-Responsive Climate-Smart Agriculture
Implementing partner: Casa Canadiense - Pueblito Canada
Funding: $1.26 million over five years

The project will improve the resilience of women, men, girls and boys to climate-change-related food insecurity, especially addressing the gendered impacts of this. This will be achieved by increasing the practice of gender-responsive climate-smart agriculture, thus augmenting peoples’ access to diverse foods, and by increasing women’s participation in decision making at the local level.

Empowering Women and Girls in the Informal Economy Sector -
Implementing partner: Alternatives
Funding: $1.7 million over three years

This project will support the empowerment of women and girls in the informal economic sector in the urban and peri-urban regions of Cortés, Atlantida and Francisco Morazan, Honduras, to eliminate violence, discrimination and other forms of gender-based violence against female workers.

Empowering Young Women in Burkina Faso and Senegal
Implementing partner: Centre de solidarité internationale du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean [international solidarity centre of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean]
Funding: $1 million over four years

This project will strengthen the entrepreneurial skills of young women in Burkina Faso and Senegal and reduce socio-cultural barriers to their participation in the labour market, in particular, by engaging their communities in female entrepreneurship and decent work.

Expanding Health and Rights in Haiti
Implementing partner: Partners in Health Canada
Funding: $2 million over three years

This project will address gaps in sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls in Haiti. It will strengthen and scale up previous work on sexual and gender-based violence and gender equality in 11 clinical sites of the Lower Artibonite and Central Plateau departments.

Improving Gender Equality in Sri Lanka
Implementing partner: International Medical Health Organization - Canada
Funding: $540,000 over four years

The project will improve gender equality for women and girls in the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka. It will provide support for women and girls who have experienced gender-based violence; increase awareness of gender equality among women, men, girls and boys; and increase the implementation and reform of relevant laws and policies aimed at achieving gender equality.

Making Trade Work for Women in Lesotho, Uganda, Madagascar and Ethiopia
Implementing partner: Trade Facilitation Office Canada
Funding: $2 million over five years

This project will enhance the economic empowerment of women by enabling trade-support institution(s) in the target countries to provide gender-responsive market-access services and ensure women-owned or -led Small and Medium Enterprises have access to those services and are implementing export plans for Canadian and other foreign markets.

More Food: Empowering Kenyan Women Farmers
Implementing partner: Farmers Helping Farmers
Funding: $1 million over four years

This project will improve food and nutrition security of farm families (women, girls, boys and men) in the Buuri dairy milk-collection area and adjacent rural communities in Meru County, Kenya. The project responds to food-security challenges, population growth and climate-change shocks affecting the lives of Kenya’s rural population, especially women farmers. It will address these challenges by applying proven approaches to increasing agricultural productivity, income, nutritional knowledge and skills among the target population.

No to Gender-Based Violence
Implementing partner: Developing World Connections
Funding: $2 million over four years

This project will reduce sexual and gender-based violence against girls and women in three districts of Sri Lanka by changing the behaviour and attitudes toward the acceptability of violence against women and girls, promoting effective leadership by civil society organizations (especially women’s and youth groups) against sexual and gender-based violence and for gender equality and supporting more effective implementation by the government and NGOs of elements of the Sri Lanka National Plan of Action for Sexual and Gender-Based Violence.

PODER
Implementing partner: Christian Aid for Under-Assisted Societies Everywhere Canada
Funding: $1.9 million over five years

The project will reduce sexual and gender-based violence and adolescent pregnancies and advance the sexual and reproductive health and rights of adolescent girls and young women in Indigenous rural communities in western Guatemala and Honduras.

RENEW
Implementing partner: World Accord - International Development Agency
Funding: $1.1 million over four years

This project will enhance the social and economic empowerment of women and girls in Nepal, especially from Dalit and the most vulnerable groups, by bringing a human-rights-based approach to economic and social growth by focusing on climate-change adaptation, enhancing the performance of micro and small-scale enterprises, increasing the access to products and services required by these enterprises, and increasing the social empowerment of women and girls to enable effective engagement in their communities.

Simameni: Stand Together for Girls’ Secondary Education
Implementing partner: Canadian Teachers’ Federation
Funding: $1.9 million over five years

This project will improve access, retention and educational opportunities for girls in secondary schools from the Western and Teso regions in Uganda. Working with the Uganda National Teachers’ Union, these improvements will be achieved through enhanced systemic support and the enriched provision of gender-responsive education.

SIMBA UTANO: Enhancing gender equality and human dignity for vulnerable adolescent girls and young women
Implementing partner: Interagency Coalition on AIDS and Development and the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations
Funding: $1.98 million over four years

The project will improve the health of 85,000 girls and young women aged 10 to 24 and 25,000 boys and young men aged 10 to 24 at risk of HIV in four priority districts of Zimbabwe. This project will also include key populations, including men who have sex with men and sex workers, and will support as many as 25,000 women of reproductive age (15 to 49 years old).

Sustainable Waste to Energy Project in Gonaïves
Implementing partner: Biothermica Technologies Inc.
Funding: $2 million over four years

This project will create remunerative and equitable jobs for men and women in Gonaïves, Haiti, while improving their environment and their health through a structured waste collection and the conversion of that waste into clean energy (i.e., biogas) and renewable energy production. This will lead to an overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Haiti. The project is expected to serve 440,000 people in Gonaïves.

Women and Girls Empowered in Ethiopia
Implementing partner: Ethiopiaid
Funding: $1.6 million over four years

The project will enhance the well-being of 6,190 marginalized women and girls in four districts of the Afar and Harari regions of Ethiopia. Ethiopiaid, through its local partners, the Afar Pastoralist Development Association and Cheshire Services Ethiopia, will increase access to and utilization of sexual and reproductive health and rights services by marginalized women and girls and create income-generating opportunities for women and youth through vocational training and business skills development.

Women’s Governance and Innovation
Implementing partner: Cégep de la Gaspésie et des Îles [college of Gaspésie and the islands]
Funding: $2 million over four years

The project targets the villages of Niodior, Dionewar and Falia in the Saloum Delta in Senegal. It will enhance the economic, social and environmental development of these communities in a sustainable way and will improve the living, working and health conditions of the inhabitants. The project is expected to serve the 14,000 people living in this region.