Strengthening Women-led Organizations for Lasting Impact

At WomenStrong International, we believe that true sustainable progress in achieving gender equity is driven by empowering women leaders and the organizations they lead. Investing in the leadership, knowledge, and organizational strength of women-led non-profits is not just a choice but a necessity for creating lasting social change.

Our grantee partners work in highly vulnerable urban and peri-urban communities worldwide. Every partner has organizational strengthening goals beyond the vital programs they implement; however, limited resources often hinder their ability to achieve these goals. Traditional funding practices often focus solely on programmatic needs, leaving little room for vital investments in leadership development, fundraising, and organizational strengthening, which would put their organizations on firmer footing and contribute to their growth.

This is why WomenStrong is committed to providing dedicated support for organizational strengthening, in addition to multi-year unrestricted grants. This support includes tailored technical assistance, collaborative learning opportunities, and additional funding specifically aimed at enhancing organizational resilience.

A Partner-Led Approach

The grantee partners we work with are at very different stages of their respective journeys – some are emerging organizations led by young leaders, while others are well-established and focused on succession planning and long-term sustainability. Some are considering scaling up, while others are in the piloting phase. Because every organization has its own sets of needs and aspirations, we believe capacity strengthening support should be flexible and partner-driven, rather than one-size-fits-all. 

Our approach is simple: It all starts with an open conversation with our partners. We begin with building a relationship grounded in mutual trust, transparency, and accountability. Rather than prescribing solutions, we listen as each partner

 identifies what their gaps are, and what they would like to achieve, improve, and strengthen in their organizations – from leadership and fundraising, to staff retention, policy development, and monitoring and evaluation.

The aim of the conversation is for each partner to identify its own priorities for the year ahead and decide on milestones that will help determine whether those priorities are being met. Then, together, we discuss potential pathways towards addressing those priorities, and how WomenStrong can support them in achieving their goals. 

Each partner’s priorities and pathways are captured in an Action Plan, which defines success and outlines areas to work on, key steps to take, and desired outcomes. The plans describe each partner’s priorities, the support they will need to reach them, and the timeframe for doing so. We value different ways of knowing, different forms of knowledge, and varied interpretations of success. We do not question why our partners identify their particular priorities, but only what we can do to help them reach their goals. 

Support Tailored to Partner Needs 

The support we offer our partners is as diverse as our partners’ needs:

1:1 Support

Where possible, WomenStrong offers the expertise of its own staff to provide customized 1:1 technical assistance, based on each partner’s needs and situations. Our partner in Zimbabwe, for example, had prioritized the development of a Child Protection Policy in the organization’s Action Plan. WomenStrong’s Chief Operating Officer worked with the partner to identify best practices, templates, and examples, and from there, the partner has started working on the policy, which WomenStrong will review when it’s ready. This hands-on support is just one example of how we provide actionable, tailored solutions to meet specific needs.

Collaborative Learning

Many of our partners share similar organizational strengthening priorities that can be addressed collaboratively in a safe space through our Learning Lab. Key themes that emerge during the development of partners’ Action Plans include leadership development, fundraising, communications, and monitoring and evaluation. Many of our partners are keen to learn from the experiences and expertise of other WomenStrong partners. Our Learning Lab provides the setting in which these common areas of capacity strengthening can be explored. Rather than imposing top-down strategies, the Lab nurtures a participatory process where women-led organizations can adapt and apply strategies across regions.

We create inclusive multilingual spaces that allow for authenticity, strive to uphold a lens of equity, and create a sense of community and belonging. We have found that one of the most exciting elements of our organizational strengthening approach is the support partners give each other. Through our Learning Lab, partners exchange insights, share best practices, and collaborate on solutions to common challenges. These exchanges make important contributions to each partner’s organizational strengthening priorities.

Local Expertise for Sustainable Local Solutions

While WomenStrong offers organizational strengthening support where it can, we also recognize that the most appropriate, sustainable support can and should be sourced locally, with expertise that understands the local context, politics, language, and challenges. Understanding the cultural, political, and economic landscape is key to implementing effective, durable solutions. Therefore, WomenStrong created a database of vetted consultants, focused on individuals who have experience working in the partners’ countries, languages, and/or with specific populations. This allows our partners to select consultants who understand their unique challenges and can provide culturally relevant support. The decision of whether to hire a consultant remains entirely with the partner.

Partner Support Funds

And finally, in addition to our unrestricted grants, we offer Partner Support Funds. Our partners, without exception, put their communities and programs first. This means that even if they receive unrestricted grants from other funders, they often do not apply their hard-earned funding to organizational needs such as strengthening internal systems and staff development. WomenStrong overcomes this conflict by providing our partners with supplementary grants to support the activities outlined in their Action Plans.

Every six months, we meet with each partner to review their plan and see how they are doing in reaching their milestones. As the political events of 2025 have made so glaringly obvious, situations change all the time. And so we go into these review meetings knowing that our partners might now have different priorities, changed timeframes, and new challenges. We adapt alongside our partners, adjusting their Action Plans where necessary and ensuring that our efforts to meet partner needs remain relevant.

Why Capacity Strengthening Matters

Our organizational strengthening program is based on the belief that strong, well-resourced women-led organizations are essential to advancing gender equity and driving systemic change. By helping equip our partners with the tools and knowledge they need, WomenStrong helps amplify their impact, ensuring that women and girls in their communities have greater access to economic opportunities, vital services, and education.

WomenStrong partners report that through our organizational strengthening program, they have gained knowledge in areas such as M&E, fundraising, and technical topics such as engaging men and boys in violence prevention and coping with vicarious trauma. They’ve revised and developed strategic plans, adapted data systems, and developed policies and systems to improve their abilities to implement and evaluate their programs more efficiently. An outcome evaluation, to be completed in May 2025, will more comprehensively describe the program’s impact on building our partners’ organizational strength and resilience.

We never imagined how the world would change in 2025, how the funding and support on which many of our grantees depend would come under such threat. Now, our work to support our partners in strengthening their organizational capacity is more important than ever. For some, the priorities they identified in their Action Plans to contribute to their sustainability, such as funding diversification and strategic planning, have become essential to their immediate survival. We can’t know what further shocks are to come. Still, we do know that it has never been as important to promote the resilience of women-led organizations working around the world to protect their communities from gender-based violence, climate injustice, economic privation, and exclusion from quality health services and education. The time is now to heed and empower those who know best what the women and girls in their communities need.