The Cost of Silence — and the Power of Action: Confronting the Global Rollback on Funding to End Violence Against Women and Girls

A wave of global funding cuts is threatening the future of civil society organizations (CSOs), particularly those working on ending violence against women. These cuts come at an already challenging time marked by widespread backlash against women’s rights and feminist movements. A recent analysis, Beyond Backlash: Advancing Movements to End Violence against Women and Girls, by the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund), highlights how feminist CSOs are confronting growing political resistance, shrinking civic space, and the rollback of hard-won progress. As reflected in a recent UN Women survey, nearly half of women’s organizations aiding women in crises may shut down within six months due to dramatic cuts in global aid, more than half have already reduced services, 67 per cent of which addresses violence against women and girls.

In February 2025, in response to funding cuts by major donors, the UN Trust Fund conducted a rapid impact assessment with its active portfolio of grantee partners – 134 organizations – to better understand its impact on (1) ending violence against women and girls (EVAWG) programming and survivors who rely on these services and (2) activists, organizations, movements, and partnerships working leading the work, in order to adapt its grantmaking and advocacy. The findings reveal an alarming reality: of the 92 grantee partners across 53 countries that responded to the survey, 60 per cent reported being directly impacted.

From Nepal to Nigeria, Peru to Tajikistan, impacts ranged from essential service reduction to survivors (78 per cent), suspended or closed shelters and crisis centers, legal aid services, and psychosocial and healthcare support due to immediate funding gaps (73 per cent). Many are also struggling to meet rising demand for services with reduced staff capacity and burnout. Nearly all grantee partners expressed deep concern about increased risks of violence for women and girls in their communities if support is not restored. They also flagged rising concerns about further funding reductions and conditionalities and increasingly limited spaces to discuss these life-threatening concerns.

One grantee partner in Africa reported suspending crucial programming for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, while in Arab States, women and girls in refugee camps are losing access to case management and emergency response mechanisms. In Latin America and the Caribbean, programmes supporting at-risk Indigenous women and girls and survivors abruptly came to a halt with several months of implementation left, thereby increasing vulnerability and extreme poverty. In Asia, funding cuts have left women staff living with HIV who work in these organizations, pushing them into financial insecurity and uncertainty.

The assessment also reaffirmed what Beyond Backlash had already illuminated: these funding losses are not only economic, they are political. The funding cuts have emboldened efforts to delegitimize feminist organizing, restricted civic engagement, and amplified misinformation campaigns targeting survivor-centered work. Women’s rights organizations (WROs) are now also under direct attack following the withdrawal of major donors - a partner from Latin America and the Caribbean as well as the Europe and Central Asia region reported that CSOs were already in danger because of shrinking civic spaces and now the global funding cuts have furthered the criminalization of the feminist movements whereby many women human rights defenders are being imprisoned. The crisis has disrupted fragile referral pathways, advocacy efforts and movement-building at a time when solidarity and collaboration are most needed. From the ground, the message is clear: this is not just a funding crisis, it is a crisis of trust, equity, and rights in the global system meant to uphold them.