The Kaleidoscope Consortium

The Global Fund for Women (GFW) is a leading funder of gender justice organizations, initiatives, and movements worldwide. In 2023, GFW is launching the Kaleidoscope Consortium: a five-year, transnational partnership with Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW), Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR), and Mobilizing Activists around Medical Abortion (MAMA) Network to transform access to safe abortion and sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The Kaleidoscope Consortium will launch in four countries — Benin, Kenya, Nepal and India — where laws and policies offer a basis for safe abortion access, but where women continue to face cultural, political, institutional, and financial barriers to making informed and autonomous decisions about their bodies and lives. The Consortium’s core strategy is to bolster women’s leadership in policy-making bodies and in health systems, both to promote effective implementation and adequate funding of existing laws and policies, and to strengthen systems’ capacity to deliver services to women and girls. In each country, the Consortium will provide funding to women’s movements and a constellation of grassroots organizations; coordinate the collaborative design of a 5-year Pathway to Health Systems Change that charts a specific course of action around service provision and access, advocacy, and culture-change; and continue to fund and support local partners to deliver on those plans.

“Together we will build a feminist ecosystem of linking and learning for safe abortion in the Global South.”

As they work to accomplish transformational change in the four target countries, the Consortium will establish a Community of Practice to bring together feminist organizations tackling health systems change in 12 countries to cross-fertilize experiences, collaborate, share learnings, and collectively document progress and best practices. The Community of Practice will bring in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania.

Each country plan will have unique indicators of systemic change at the end of 5 years, including improvements to existing law, clear implementation roadmaps, increased capacity of service providers, and strengthened accountability measures. Each country likewise will define target outcomes for women and girls around, for example, increased percentages of women and girls with access to safe abortion services, increased use of contraceptives, decreases in maternal deaths, and decreases in births to women aged 15-19. Women and girls’ participation in local and national decision-making spaces is another measure of success: their engagement in these platforms will catalyze their broader leadership and strengthen their influence at the household, community, organizational, and systemic level. Individually, GFW and its three core partners bring distinct bodies of expertise to the table, including grassroots-driven grantmaking, organizational capacity-building, cross-border collaboration, community-led research, narrative change, and national campaigns and network building. Collectively, they operate in 44 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. In the past 5 years, they have partnered with 90+ feminist and youth organizations in these regions, built substantive relationships with bilateral and multilateral stakeholders around key sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice (SRHRJ) priority areas, produced 65+ SRHRJ knowledge resources, and distributed USD $33 million in grantmaking dollars. In the past 30 years, Global Fund for Women has been the first institutional funder for 700+ organizations and seeded 15 new women’s funds. Worldwide, GFW has moved USD $32.7 million to 1,073 groups in 131 countries for SRHRJ, leading to key wins like the Green Wave movement that pushed to legalize abortion in Mexico. As a result of GFW’s support over the last five years, 11 abortion-related rollbacks have been prevented by 10 groups in 8 countries; 19 new laws were advocated for and ultimately adopted in 12 countries; and the capacities of 182 groups in 44 countries were strengthened.

Global Fund for Women

The Kaleidoscope Consortium

Model and Strategy

Impact

Leadership

Latanya Mapp Frett

Ankit Gupta