Why Feminist Funding is Crucial for Development

This podcast was originally recorded on Friday, October 29th, 2021 for the CID Speaker Series featuring Latanya Mapp Frett, President of Global Fund for Women. Frett continued the conversation with our CID Student Ambassador, Kerianne DiBattista, after an appearance at the virtual CID Speaker Series event, Co-sponsored by the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School. From the Green Wave to #EndSARS, movements drive social transformation but lack resources and support. Feminist funds are changing that. They up-end the development model by providing flexible funding straight to local grassroots leaders and groups to use as they wish. Instead of dictating priorities, feminist funds follow grantees’ leadership, supporting them in addressing needs, opportunities, and challenges as they arise, on their own terms. Traditional philanthropy can resemble an old boys’ club. Only 0.42%—less than half of 1%—of all foundation grants are dedicated to women's rights. Feminist funders take a different approach. Think less top-down decision making, exploitation, and poverty porn; and more solidarity, trust, and building collective power.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.