Small Grants series

Group of women sitting outside in a courtyard, wearing colourful clothes and headscarves, listening to one woman standing up and carrying a folder
Courtyard session. Credit: Badabon Sangho

The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) is committed to focusing grant selection on women’s rights organizations, women- and girl-led organizations, and organizations with local and community reach. The Small Grants modality is a key mechanism for achieving this.  

Small Grants are currently provided to organizations managing annual operational budgets below USD 200,000, which are eligible for a UN Trust Fund grant of up to USD 150,000. Recognizing that rigorous, external evaluation practices can come at a significant cost and require expertise and resources that can be out of reach for some civil society and women’s rights organizations, the UN Trust Fund is encouraging lower cost, practice-based learning that brings practitioners, researchers and donors together and encourages donors to help bridge the gap between cutting edge evaluation methodologies and limited evaluation capacity on the ground. 

Since 2019, the UN Trust Fund has provided tailored support to organizations receiving small grants to evaluate and document results and lessons of their projects. These approaches have included: 

  • Strategically selecting a few projects receiving small grants for evaluations, providing direct support to co-manage the evaluation process, including projects in Nigeria, Solomon Islands and Albania. 
  • Co-producing a five-episode podcast series on the work of small grantees funded by the UN Trust Fund working to end violence against women and girls.
  • Co-managing a Cluster Evaluation with three UN Trust Fund-supported projects in North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
  • Co-producing meta-analyses and extracting results and lessons learnt with a focus on knowledge sharing, including 18 projects implemented between 2019-2022, and 9 projects under the Spotlight portfolio.
  • Co-creating project summaries and knowledge products with over 30 UN Trust Fund grantees to document the results and lessons to support advocacy and resource mobilization efforts beyond the UN Trust Fund grant:

  1. Project Summary of “Prevention and Response Routes to Violence against Girls with Disabilities for the State of Yucatán in Mexico” by Ciencia Social Alternativa A.C. [English] [Spanish]

  2. Project Summary of “Paraguay Includes” by Coordinadora por los Derechos de la Infancia y la Adolescencia [English] [Spanish]

  3. Project Summary of “Capacity-Building to Protect, Assist and Integrate Central American Female Victims of Violence in Costa Rica” by the Centre for the Social Rights of Migrants [English] [Spanish]

  4. Project Summary of “The Multisectoral Approach to the Prevention of Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Kyrgyzstan” by the Center for Research on Democratic Process [English] [Russian]  

  5. Project Summary of “Preventing and Responding to Violence against Women and Girls with Disabilities in Kenya” by Women Challenged to Challenge [English] [French]

  6. Project Summary of “Eliminating Violence against Women and Girls with Disabilities in Rwanda” by UNABU: Umuryango Nyarwanda w’Abagore Bafite Ubumuga [English] [French]