As the world rallies for the 16 Days of Activism on Violence Against Women and Girls, Lina, a Syrian woman active in community organizing with women and girls in North West Syria (name changed for risk mitigation reasons), shares her reflections on the important role of local, grassroots women’s organisations in addressing gender-based violence in a context affected by both conflict and the impact of a massive earthquake earlier this year.

As a grassroots organization working with and led by women themselves, the concept of creating a safe space in which women and girls can come together is central to what we do and who we are. One challenge we have faced in the past is that often donors and international agencies want to support us on specific thematic issues that are their priorities, and less support is available to support us to sustain ourselves and invest in our core mandate as an organization.

Working on issues affecting women and girls can involve touching on subjects that are sensitive because of the wider social and political context. Our approach to managing these risks involves using concepts and language to describe and implement what we do that are sensitive to our context and make sense both to the women and girls who participate in our work, and to their wider family members and others in the community. Indeed part of our work involves taking deliberate steps to engage male family members and community representatives, rather than avoiding them. Through this, we build their understanding and support for how we are working with women and girls on their contributions in society. All of this requires longer-term support for our work than is possible through only 3-month or 6-month projects or partnerships.

So we are grateful that from one international donor, supporting a consortium led by a Syrian national NGO and involving both an international NGO and another women-focused national civil society organisation, we have managed to secure support over the past year and half to invest in strengthening ourselves as an organization, and in actions like facilitating safe spaces for women and girls.

Through this same partnership, we have invested in a process of consultation with the women and girls that participate in our work to identify their priorities and decide how to allocate the resources available for training and allocating a microgrant to address things that they see as important. The potential focus for the microgrant was open to be determined by those we involved in the process, and in the end their choice has been to support a new initiative focused on legal issues that are faced by the women in the communities such as inheritance rights and civil documentation. This initiative has been really well received, as can be measured by the high number of consultation requests that our community center has received for support on these issues. Building on this, we plan to extend the initiative further beyond the existing support from the microgrant to get further support from other organizations to expand the geographical coverage.

Whereas most of our past partnerships have treated us as the junior partner to implement projects on specific priorities identified by the donor, we are now planning to invest in things that we and the women and girls that we support see as important. Linked to this, we have established an advocacy committee comprised of twelve women to develop a kind of advocacy strategy to inform how we engage with others at the local level. In June, five months after the quake hit our region, we also met together with other grassroots women’s organisations to reflect on how that crisis had impacted on our longer-term work to support women and girls, how we responded and adapted our work after the quake. We also reflected together on what were the good experiences we had in solidarity from other national organisations and international agencies, as well as what could have gone better.

Through our first-hand experience, we saw how the kinds of challenges and risks that women and girls faced changed and worsened after the quake. For example,  when consulting with a local community about establishing field water-sanitation units, only men were consulted about the locations and the design of the units. This left the women feeling unsafe to use these units, especially during the night. Based on this reflection and follow-up discussions that we have had with other grassroots womens’ organisations and initiatives in North West Syria, as well as with external organisations of relevance such as UN Women, there are three key recommendations that I would like to share.

• We want an active role for women in our community; we are tired of being directed, being an implementation tool in projects designed by others. The approach to partnerships with grassroots womens organisations need to shift. We want to be a part of the planning, and consultation process. Women-oriented projects in North West Syria should be led by Syrian women who are living and working there. This needs donors to allow for sufficient time and flexibility in partnerships to enable this, and require that international or national organisations that work with them demonstrate how they are doing this.

• Donors need to follow-up with the organisations that they fund, both international, national and local, to monitor, evaluate and ensure accountability so that both projects focused on womens’ empowerment, as well as projects to promote a basic gender sensitivity, are delivering genuine results. There are too many initiatives that perform a cosmetic level of women’s participation, but they are not really empowering women to make decisions or impact the decisions made by others that affect their lives.

• Donors need to find ways to strengthen support to smaller women-led grassroots organisations and informal community-based initiatives. Larger organisations work under different kinds of political and operational constraint, and they are not able to be so flexible or responsive to the priorities of women organizing to promote the priorities of women and girls. Organisations like my own can be more flexible, but we are not currently the main partner for most donors or international agencies.