The June 2005 issue of Alliance Magazine had a special feature on 'Funding Social Justice', for which Firoze Manji and Gary Craig are guest editors. The Editorial and Comment and Analysis sections of Pambazuka News this week reproduces selected articles from this edition.

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Alliance provides news and analysis of what’s happening in the philanthropy and social investment sectors across the world, and a forum for exchange of ideas and experiences among practitioners. Published by Allavida, Alliance is for all those who want to keep up to date with developments and new thinking in this field. As well as news and conference reports, articles, and regular features such as book reviews and regional news, each issue has a special in-depth feature on some key aspect of philanthropy and social investment, with contributors from around the world and guest editors who are experts on that topic. Alliance aims always to include diverse northern and southern perspectives, connecting people and ideas across the world. To find out more, visit www.allavida.org/alliance

EDITORIAL: Interview with Betty Murungi, Director of Urgent Action Fund-Africa
COMMENT & ANALYSIS:
- From noblesse oblige to solidarity: the nature of social justice funding – Firoze Manji
- Politics of social justice philanthropy: the Arab Human Rights Fund – Fateh Azam
- Social justice through philanthropy – Gary Craig
- South Africa: Corporate social social investment - Christa Kuljian
LETTERS: Open letter to the G8, audience feedback and Live 8
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Is Tony Blair’s African mission another Shakespearean tale, "… told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”?
GLOBAL CALL TO ACTION AGAINST POVERTY: News from around Africa on the GCAP campaign
CONFLICTS & EMERGENCIES: Mayi-Mayi attacks in the DRC; Somalia clan violence
REFUGEES & FORCED MIGRATION: Displaced afraid to return home after Ivory Coast violence
WOMEN & GENDER: Promoting and protecting the inheritance rights of women
ELECTIONS & GOVERNANCE: Addis Ababa violence following elections; Zimbabwe stay away begins
DEVELOPMENT: Bush and the debt cancellation challenge
HEALTH & HIV/AIDS: Brazil suspends patents on ARVs
BOOKS & ARTS: Africa's media, democracy and the politics of belonging

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Urgent Action Fund-Africa was established in Kenya in August 2001. The basic aim: to support the work of women in Africa through rapid response grantmaking and unique initiatives that support women’s leadership in peace-building and justice processes. UAF-Africa thus aims to provide women with the resources required to respond effectively in conflict situations. Will it be possible to build a philanthropic base in Africa to support these activities, Caroline Hartnell, editor of Alliance, asked Betty Murungi, Director of Urgent Action Fund-Africa. And where is support most likely to come from?

CH: Why was the decision made to set up Urgent Action Fund-Africa? And what does it hope to achieve?

BM: Urgent Action Fund (UAF) was established in 1997 by three women’s rights activists who were strongly committed to the idea of making small grants to enable women activists to respond effectively in unanticipated situations. UAF priorities include conflict areas and situations of escalating violence. With many armed conflicts currently raging in Africa, UAF-Africa was established in 2001 to enable UAF to respond better to the needs of African women in conflict situations. UAF is an activists’ fund run by an activists’ board, some of whom live in conflict countries.

The basic aim of UAF-Africa is to promote the human rights of women and girls by making grants to activists. Our three thematic areas are peace-building and transitional justice; promoting understanding of regional instruments for the advancement of women’s rights; and rapid response grantmaking. But UAF’s core programme globally is rapid response grantmaking. Here the three categories of grant are situations of armed conflict; precedent-setting legislative or legal action, and protection of women human rights defenders.

CH: These rapid response grants – what are they and what are they for?

BM: Rapid response grants are basically grants that don’t take nine months to make. When the women who founded UAF sat around a table in early 1997, they realized that the biggest gap in funding for women human rights activists related to the lack of readily available small grants to enable them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities that may advance the rights of women or respond to unanticipated situations that threaten to undermine such rights. The actions that UAF rapid response grants support are often very strategic in their effect and reach.

This lack of funding is certainly a problem for activists in Africa. You make an application for a grant and it’s reviewed by a board which reviews applications perhaps twice a year. But in situations of conflict, you cannot wait for the twice-yearly review board to meet. So the UAF board came up with the idea of the rapid response grant, which would enable them to make money available very quickly, within a week in fact. And we are very proud to be able to say that we respond to requests within 72 hours. The board works very quickly, consulting each other by email and phone. A decision is communicated to the group or activist within a week.

Consider our protection grants for women human rights defenders. If somebody’s life is in danger, waiting six months is obviously not going to be any good. The same is true of our precedent-setting legal action grants. If you’re going to file a legal action, you’re taking advantage of an unanticipated opportunity that has presented itself. You need a decision quickly otherwise the opportunity passes.

That is what rapid response grantmaking is all about. Our grants are quite high risk but we are aware that you have to take risks in this kind of grantmaking.

CH: Does this level of urgency apply to all your grantmaking?

BM: No. At UAF-Africa we have other programmes where the grantmaking supports more the ‘strategic’ intervention where the time urgency is not necessarily so great.

Take our peace-building and transitional justice programme – an area that is unique to UAF-Africa. This is based on our strong belief that women should be able to participate freely in all aspects of conflict transformation and post-conflict reconstruction. You hear a lot about the need for women to be in parliament, but women also need to be in the places where peace is being negotiated – which are often also where the political arrangements are negotiated that determine how women are going to be placed in emerging societies. We feel it’s really important for women activists to be able to be present at these events. But a grant in this area won’t necessarily have to be made in a matter of a week.

CH: Going back to the issue of risk, what do you mean when you say your grantmaking is quite high risk? Are you referring to the risk that the grant will be misused, or that it won’t do any good in the end?

BM: The high risk is directly related to the rapidity with which grants are made. We do due diligence like every other grantmaker, but we don’t have six months to examine every detail of a proposal.

We also consider the grants to be high risk because they are sometimes made to unknown entities – UAF doesn’t often fund large, well-established, well-known groups that have sizeable international funding already. The good things that happen in our communities often happen because women who are not known are doing the work. When you’re making grants to unknown entities, you obviously run the risk that your grant is not going to do what was set out in the grant proposal.

However, even with some of the more known groups that we make grants to, we normally like to have two endorsements. We rely heavily on our network of advisers all over the world for these endorsements. We also try to go on outreach missions ourselves as much as possible, to enable us to meet the people who are working on the ground. But of course you can never get to all of them, so to a certain extent you do run a risk.

CH: Do you make grants to individuals, or is it always to a group, however unknown?

BM: Yes, we do make grants to individuals. These are usually protection grants to women human rights defenders, and these grants are always confidential. If you are making a protection grant to an individual, you don’t want to broadcast it to the whole world and so put the life of the activist in danger. But this applies only to the protection grants to individuals.

CH: In practice, have you had many bad experiences or does this high risk grantmaking on the whole work?

BM: In seven years of making grants – and this is globally because UAF-Africa started making grants only in May last year – I think we have had one, at most two, experiences where evaluation has shown that perhaps the money has not been applied for the reasons for which it was requested. What we have done to try to deal with these situations is to come up with a really good evaluation system. From our grantee reports, it is clear that the money so far has gone to really deserving cases and causes.

CH: Can I move on to the funding and where it’s going to come from? I assume at the moment it’s going to be coming from UAF in the US, but are you also starting to fundraise in Africa?

BM: We started fundraising in Africa even before the independent office was established in 2001. UAF and UAF-Africa are one organization with one board of directors, so this has been joint fundraising. But because UAF-Africa has additional programmes, we have been fundraising from here in Kenya too.

So, for example, we have received a lot of support from the Ford Foundation’s East Africa Office since 2000, and since 2003 we have received support from the Ford Foundation’s Special Initiative for Africa, now Trust Africa, which has supported our work around transitional justice and regional instruments for advancing women’s rights. We have also received support from, among others, HIVOS, OSI and Cordaid; from the UK Department for International Development, and from the Dutch Government, which is very interested in peace-keeping in the Great Lakes Region.

But we haven’t received any money from African governments yet. Perhaps we should approach some of them, perhaps the South African government or the Nigerian government. These are rich African governments that should support our work.

CH: What about individual donors? And what about individuals in Africa?

BM: Yes, we do receive funds from individuals, mainly in the US, some of whom support the work of UAF-Africa. Individuals were very instrumental in supporting the work of UAF at the beginning. We receive support from some smaller family foundations as well as faith-based funders.

We have established a fundraising programme here in Kenya. Right now, we’re interested in funding work to address issues of conflict, and I’ve decided that we must target individuals. And not just individuals – we’re also interested in getting support from corporations working in the region.

One of our fundraising strategies has been to set up donor circles. Our first donor circle is meeting to discuss ways of supporting programmes in Kenya that reduce violence against girls – members want to make sure that the funds they donate to UAF-Africa are used within East Africa.

CH: What about raising money from corporations?

BM: Raising money from multinational corporations working here and from African-owned businesses is work in progress at the moment. We are concerned not to raise funds from businesses that themselves abuse the rights of women and girls in their employment practices or otherwise, so this is something that will need a little more thought.

CH: In the long run, do you feel there are sufficient resources in Africa to support the kind of grantmaking you want to do?

BM: I am completely confident that there are enough resources here. We just have to do a bit more work to set out what we’re doing and why it is so important. I think people on this side of the world have seen the kind of damage that conflicts do to communities, so yes, I think this is going to be successful. We have received small amounts of money and volunteer time from some individuals in Kenya as well as from the donor circle.

CH: Going back to the donor circle, does it on the whole consist of very wealthy people? And are they women only or women and men?

BM: Well, our first donor circle is actually made up entirely of men! Women have been giving of their time and money without being in a donor circle – we have a lot of women volunteers – and a lot of the in-kind donations that we receive are from women, but this first donor circle consists of men. They are not extremely wealthy; they’re just well-off, middle-class men, mainly professional people, and they’ve decided to conduct the meetings and run the group themselves.

Eventually we hope to create other donor circles, perhaps with young feminists as well. UAF has been receiving support for a couple of years from a group of high-school girls, which is really inspiring. These are the kinds of things that we want to build on and encourage in this country and see where it goes.

CH: What do you see as the main barriers to raising funds in Africa?

BM: One thing you must understand is that Africans have a very philanthropic nature. We in this country have always given money to educate children, finance weddings, pay hospital and funeral bills, build schools and hospitals. It has been very informal but it’s not something that is new or alien. In Kenya, this philanthropy was abused by state interference and corruption. So even in philanthropy we must uphold democratic practice and free will.

CH: But are there barriers to raising money for the particular work that you’re doing?

BM: Yes, one barrier is that even as we discuss philanthropy we have to take into account the economic injustices that exist in Africa. Social justice philanthropy addresses injustice and the causes of injustice – UAF specifically tries to address the injustices that women continue to suffer. If you want to raise funds to deal with that kind of issue, you have to increase the understanding of the society in which you want to raise the funds. We have to raise issues of cultural extremism, fundamentalism and patriarchy, and we have to be really sensitive in the way we deal with them. Some of these issues have now become global: the whole question around fundamentalism is not an African issue, it’s a global one. Cultural extremism is a global concern. Discrimination against women exists everywhere and there is sometimes a sense of fatigue when one raises these issues.

So there’s all this resistance. ‘OK, you want to raise money so you can give it away to advance the rights of women and girls. How come? Why now?’ So we have to do a lot of sharing of knowledge and working to create a sense of how important the work is. And that sharing of knowledge of course adds to whatever financial capital this philanthropy brings in because it is not just about the money, it’s about raising the understanding of the community in which you are working and breaking down barriers. This will eventually make it easier for us to activate the philanthropic nature of our community members.

The need to raise funds to reduce or prevent conflict is very easily understood by communities in which conflict has occurred, so fundraising for this is the really easy bit. But in countries where there hasn’t been open all-out war, there is a sense in which people want to bury their heads in the sand and not get into conflict prevention discussions. But they identify with general women rights protection.

CH: Sometimes you hear of organizations doing social justice grantmaking that try to play down what they’re doing when they’re fundraising so that it doesn’t sound too threatening to people. But that doesn’t sound like something you’d do?

BM: Oh no, we don’t do that at all. All our materials and brochures come out with examples of the most cutting edge grantmaking we’re doing. We’re not making any apologies for being activists ourselves, nor for being feminists, and we’re not shying away from the fact that we make grants to groups that are engaged in sexual rights work. For example, we recently made a grant to a group of commercial sex workers in Uganda for their advocacy for better treatment by the law. And it’s all out there in our materials. So we’re really up front about the work we’re doing. Women’s rights advocacy is often threatening, but so is the reality of dealing with legal discrimination, sexual violence during conflict, effects of patriarchy, bad governance and lack of democracy, which are what make the advocacy necessary in the first place.

CH: If you looked say five years ahead, where do you see your best prospect in Africa for fundraising? Companies? Individuals?

BM: I think that our best prospect is individuals. They are more likely to get sold on programmes for change because they have more to lose if things break down. We’re talking about corruption, war and destruction, poverty. We’re doing work around women. You speak to men about their daughters and all of a sudden they sit up and listen very carefully. So I think we have a great opportunity to raise funds from individual men. Of course I realize that we cannot at this time do without foundation funding and bilateral donors, but we must try and wean ourselves from this, diversify our funding base to include the local community.

As far as women are concerned, they have everything to gain by ensuring that laws and constitutions that do not discriminate against them are adopted in their various countries, and making sure the world roots out the kind of violence we have seen and continue to see every day. Just yesterday (16 March) 38 people were murdered, most of them young children and women, murdered as they slept in their homes in northern Kenya because of a boundary dispute. This is how conflict begins in this part of the world – battles over natural resources egged on by political interests. After the murders yesterday, some of our volunteers called me in the office and said, ‘What can we do? Can we go over there in teams and speak with the elders and community leaders?’ That’s the kind of interest they have in peace-building.

For me in five years I’m looking at a situation where Urgent Action Fund-Africa is being sustained by African individuals and African corporations who have realized it is about their own life, about their own continent, about every conflict in Africa.

CH: And do you see this support coming equally from men and women?

BM: Yes, I do. I have a feeling that women will do a lot more of the work, but they will also be able to mobilize resources. Men need to get a lot more information but there are very many concerned men here in Africa. Obviously they control more of the resources, so we are targeting them to make sure they give to these things that affect their daughters, wives and mothers.

BIOGRAPHY

Betty Kaari Murungi is a feminist lawyer with expertise in international human rights law. Since 1998, she has been a consultant and legal adviser to the women’s rights programme at Rights and Democracy on gender-related crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She currently serves as Director of Urgent Action Fund-Africa.

Betty Murungi serves on the Board of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice – formerly the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice – for the International Criminal Court. She is a member of the Kenya Bar and received the national honour of the Moran of the Order of the Burning Spear (MBS) in December 2003 for her work in human rights. She can be contacted at [email][email protected]

See www.urgentactionfund.org

* Please send comments to [email protected]

* This article was first published in the June 2005 issue of Alliance Magazine, which has a special feature on 'Funding Social Justice', for which Firoze Manji and Gary Craig are guest editors. To find out more, visit

Lobby group Jubilee SA has accused Johannesburg police of harassing its demonstrators outside the Barclays head office in Sandton on Friday. "Jubilee SA demonstrators had been peacefully voicing their dissent of the Barclays-ABSA deal - within the bounds of the Gathering Act - for over 45 minutes, when a police van drove up to the demonstration with its siren wailing," said Tristen Taylor, spokesperson for the organisation.

"The Broad Alliance hereby confirms that it has called a 2 day nationwide Mass Stay Away from 9 to 10 June 2005. The Broad Alliance is a coalition of democratic forces who have decided to work together for the common goal of establishing a just, prosperous and democratic Zimbabwe." Amongst the aims of the stayaway is to enable Zimbabweans to protest against recent state destruction of peoples' homes and the attack on the livelihood of millions of innocent people in the informal sector. Also available by clicking on the link below are statements by ZimRights and Nango. Lastly, there is a moving account of what it is like to be on the frontline of recent police actions in Zimbabwe.
Further Links:
http://www.kubatana.net
http://www.zwnews.com
http://www.sokwanele.com
http://www.zvakwana.org

The directive by the ANC-led government that the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) investigate the possibility of a third force being involved in recent protests, while the ANC itself acknowledges that the issues raised by protesters are genuine, is very mischievous and a waste of resources. This seems to be a tactic to split the forces protesting for change and also to divert attention from the issues leading to protests.

Ethiopia has put an opposition leader and his deputy under house arrest hours after clashes in the capital city left 22 dead, an EU observer has reported. Hailu Shawul heads the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), which denies organising student protests in Addis Ababa at alleged election fraud. Addis Ababa has seen three days of street protests at the ruling party's alleged massive use of fraud at the polls.

In the week in which anti-poverty campaigners launched Live8 (*) and ahead of next week's crucial G8 Finance Ministers meeting in London, a series of open letters from global celebrities to the G8 Finance Ministers are being published in some of the most influential newspapers in the world, calling for decisive action by world leaders to tackle poverty once and for all. With only 9 days to go until the Ministers meet in London, and under 4 weeks to go until the world focuses its attention on the G8 summit in Scotland, campaigners, religious leaders, musicians, film stars and the general public alike are backing the demands of the Global Call to Action against Poverty for more and better aid, trade justice and debt cancellation.

South Africa's most important corruption trial since liberation has ended in a 15-year prison sentence for Schabir Shaik, financial adviser to the country's deputy president, Jacob Zuma. The long prison term adds to the pressure on President Thabo Mbeki - who soon faces a crucial G8 Heads of Government Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland - to fire Zuma, the leading contender to succeed him as head of state.

On June 16, GCAP coalitions across Africa are organizing joint actions to mark the Day of the African Child. The Day of the African child is an annual event to mark the 1976 massacre of Soweto children by the apartheid regime. GCAP coalitions have chosen this date to have an African White Band Day and to make a regional plea for leaders to take immediate action to end the extreme poverty that leads to a child dying every three seconds.

The GCAP campaign in Mozambique is on track. Last Wednesday 1st June, we launched the campaign through a public forum about the issue of poverty and MDG progress in Africa and Mozambique in particularly. About 100 people from different organizations, students, academics, attended the event lead by Graça Machel. The event had the participation of senior members of Mozambican Government; UNDP and prominent Mozambicans activists. Were planning to bring Pres. Chissano to the campaign.

The UN is looking into how best to resolve the problem of internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide, Dennis McNamara, the Special Adviser of the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator on Internal Displacement and Director of the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division in the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said. More attention would be paid to eight countries with acute IDP problems. The countries are Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. He said the problem of displacement was also a challenge to peace-building and post-conflict recovery.

The executive secretary of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, Mamadou Ndoye, on Monday told the third African international Conference on ECD that opened in Accra, Ghana, that research had shown that early years were crucial for the intellectual development of a child. "Africa should focus on ECD because it has the most youthful population in the world, with 25% of the population comprising children below five," Ndoye said.

This report from the World Development Movement is concerned with democracy; a complex issue at the best of times, made even more complex not only by the many local, regional and national struggles for self-determination across the globe but also by the development of supra-national decision-making bodies that are many times removed from individual citizens. It is this latter complexity, and in particular the actions of the two principal International Financial Institutions (IFIs) - the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) - that provides the focus for this report.

The UK's plan to write off debts owed by African nations is facing opposition in the US - and particularly from President George W Bush. Bush said a key part of the plan did not fit with the US budget process. Bush's stance sets up a possible clash with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, due in Washington soon. The UK is pushing hard for major debt relief and a doubling of aid to Africa, and Chancellor Gordon Brown laid out a set of ambitious plans last Thursday.

Unless the international community starts planning together for a peaceful transition to democracy, Zimbabwe faces chaos and violence as the Mugabe era draws to a close. 'Post-Election Zimbabwe: What Next?', the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the situation in the country since the 31 March 2005 parliamentary elections that confirmed the full control of President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF government. Neither free nor fair, that poll was yet another phase in the crisis that has dominated Zimbabwe's political life for the past five years. But change is coming. "The post-election situation may seem like business as usual, but Mugabe's era is ending", says Peter Kagwanja, Crisis Group's South Africa Project Director. "Both ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) now face existential challenges".

Learning Development Kenya (LDK) is a national non-governmental and non-sectarian development organization founded in June, 1998. Its mission is to respond to the needs of communities and its children, with a primary objective of improving the quality of life of those in need, as defined with words such as extreme poverty, destitution, oppression, deprivation and austerity.

The UN Human Rights Committee has ruled that Angola violated the freedom of expression of a journalist who was imprisoned in 1999 for criticizing the country's president. Rafael Marques de Morais, an Angolan journalist, was arrested and imprisoned in Luanda, on October 16, 1999, following the publication in the Agora newspaper of remarks by him about Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos. Among other things, Marques said that the President was responsible "for the destruction of the country" and "accountable for the promotion of incompetence, embezzlement and corruption." Marques was detained for forty days without charges, ten of them incommunicado.

A split has developed in the African Union, with its chairman publicly rebuking the head of its commission. The row between chairman Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian president, and Alpha Oumar Konare is the union's most public since its formation in 2002. It concerns who has the final say on Togo, which has been in turmoil since controversial elections in April. President Obasanjo was reportedly angry he had not been consulted over the appointment of a special envoy.

In his commentary on Live Aid, Mr. Abdul-Raheem rhetorically asked why Fela Kuti, among others, was not invited to perform at one of the upcoming benefit concerts. The primary reason is that Mr. Kuti has been dead for eight years. If he wishes to embark on a critique of Live Aid (much of which I agree with), he should at least get his facts straight.

TAJUDEEN ABDUL-RAHEEM RESPONDS:In Yoruba Femi will be known as Femi Fela kuti. So calling him Fela Kuti is not off the mark!

Some foreign companies in Africa are as guilty of corruption as the nations in which they invest, planning minister Anyang’ Nyong’o told an economic summit. The minister said that while African corporate dealings were becoming cleaner, the bribes were higher because of increased risk of getting caught. Global business leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit said Africa was winning the war on graft, often cited as a major barrier to trade and investment in the continent.