Granting

The Ipas Collaborative Actions Fund (Ipas Fund) seeks to foster strong movements for social change, focused on reproductive justice, including abortion rights. The Ipas Fund does this by providing financial and technical resources to local groups and organizations, through feminist grantmaking practices. Grants feature across the technical and programmatic components of Ipas’s work, including health systems, policy advocacy, and community engagement. Grantmaking strengthens the abortion ecosystem and supports and sustains abortion programming within local organizations. For grantees, flexible grants will allow them to determine and conceptualize their own strategies to advance the reproductive rights of women and girls in their communities. This includes integrating new or enhanced abortion programming in their scope of work and building their capacity to strengthen social movements for reproductive rights. For the safe abortion field, Ipas plays a unique role as a grantmaking program that is based in the Global South. Ipas plays a strategic role within the constellation of women’s funds and philanthropic actors that mobilize resources to distribute to dynamic women’s rights groups in the Global South. Ipas grants are intersectional, enabling grantees to work across the themes of abortion, sexual and reproductive health and rights, LGBTI rights, and the intersection of SRHR and climate change.

The Ipas grant-making has four primary objectives:

1. To inspire and support the meaningful integration of safe abortion content and commitments into the agendas of women’s rights organizations, youth-led organizations, community-based groups, and broad-based civil society organizations.
2. To support the efforts of local communities and change agents to transform social norms and practices that stigmatize abortion.
3. To advocate for the rights of young women and increase young women’s access to safe abortion.
4. To strengthen local, national, and regional movements working for the liberal reform of laws and policies that limit women’s rights and access to safe abortion.

Ipas Africa Alliance therefore invites Community Voices Network (CVN) to apply with innovative ideas and strategies that integrate art and/or digital technology in transforming social norms and practices that drive GBV and teenage pregnancies within Nairobi and its environment.

Grantee Criteria

• Youth led and youth focused organization.
• Youth organizations with women’s Reproductive health and rights included in their strategic objectives.
• Youth-led organizations that work through storytelling, digital technology such as TikTok, and use of art such as graffiti.
• Youth led organization that is well connected to community self-help groups and collaborate to advance women’s empowerment.
• Youth led organization that has evidence of work done and has been featured on digital platforms.
• Youth-led organization that has existed for at least 3 years and are locally registered.
• Youth-led organization that has an annual operating budget of under $ 50k
• Youth-led organization that has a vision for how abortion rights advance the rights of women, girls,

and others who need an abortion.

• Youth-led organizations that can scale their work and contribute to donor learning.
• Youth-led organization with annual narrative and financial reports.
• Youth-led organization with a bank account that can accept foreign funds, and clear processes for financial management.

Attachments to RFA:

1. Attachment A – Application Form
2. Attachment B – Management Systems Questionnaire
3. Attachment C – Instructions to Grantees

All Grantees are responsible for carefully reviewing all information, including attachments, and following any instructions related to this RFA. If anything is unclear, the Grantee should submit questions and comments to the assigned Ipas contact by the date indicated above.