Women’s rights movements and organizations are key drivers for creating change to advance, sustain and defend women’s human rights and gender justice worldwide. This is especially crucial in times of crisis and conflicts. To address systemic barriers and make it easier for women, girls and LGBTQI+ communities to live and thrive in dignity and peace, they advocate for changes in laws, policies, societal and cultural norms.

The Women’s Voice and Leadership Learning Partnership (Learning Partnership) seeks to accompany the renewed Women’s Voice and Leadership (WVL) program, a flagship initiative of Global Affairs Canada (GAC), to provide sustainable resources and programming to women’s rights organizations (WROs), lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and gender non-conforming communities (LGBTQI+) groups and their movements. It is a five-year initiative, co-designed between GAC and IDRC, and its implementation is led by IDRC, with a budget of CAD10.85 million.

The Learning Partnership will support a learning agenda, co-developed through consultations with the WVL community, which includes implementing partners, sub-implementing partners and community stakeholders (women’s and LGBTQI+ rights organizations, grassroots organizations and feminist movements). This agenda will guide efforts to strengthen the impact of the renewed Women’s Voice and Leadership (RWVL) program in advancing human rights and gender equality. It will complement the RWVL geographic projects with peer-to-peer learning and knowledge sharing, capacity strengthening support to WROs, LGBTQI+ groups and movements, and contribute to building the evidence around what works and does not work in terms of funding to support feminist and gender-equality movements globally.