Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a form of violence against girls and women, held in place by social norms. It is generally practised as a matter of social and traditional convention and is interlinked with social acceptance, peer pressure and fear of not having access to particular resources and opportunities.
Options as part of a UK government funded consortium has engaged to carry out the Africa-led movement (ALM) to end FGM programme, with the goal of ultimately ending FGM. The consortium’s approach to support the Africa-led movement is girl-centred, recognises the intersecting identities that inform their lives, and aims to empower all girls and women - promoting health, bodily autonomy, and their right to live free from violence. The programme takes an adaptive management approach.
One of the programme’s key initiatives is a grassroots grants scheme. Funds will flow to grantee partners through a granting mechanism managed by Options with technical and strategic guidance from across the programme consortium. Youth, grassroots, and women’s rights organisations are a core success factor in reducing FGM and other forms of violence, yet only a small fraction of gender equality development funding reaches these groups. Grants will help finance both community-based initiatives and the roles that these groups might play in the accelerating and scaling programme approaches. The design of the grassroots grants has been inspired and informed by participatory and feminist grant-making processes, including shifting decision making power by establishing local panels to select and support grantee partners; funding cohorts of grantee partners and assigning a more experienced local organisation to provide mentoring/training; and developing participatory forms of monitoring and evaluation that allow grantee partners to contribute to strengthening strategy, ways of working, etc.
The grants strategy has been finalised, and initial tools and processes are in place, with grantee partners identified in focal counties in Kenya. However, ongoing development and learning/adaptation on strategy, tools and processes will be required as we rapidly scale the grassroots grants, including into new countries, during 2022 and 2023
The Grants Lead will initiate, coordinate, and oversee the technical implementation of the programme to provide small grants to grassroots organisations working to end female genital mutilation in four focal countries (Kenya, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Senegal).
The Grants Lead serves as the lead person for the grants scheme, managing the design of a robust, adaptive, and secure granting mechanism implemented across four countries.
To succeed in this role, you will have: