In brief. Starting this month, the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) will celebrate the work of its grantees every month through the RFLD Beneficiary Spotlight. This first edition features women-led organisations, youth groups and community media working on gender-based violence, girls’ leadership, youth development, land rights, local governance, digital safety, psychosocial care and regional advocacy. Their work shows what happens when funding reaches organisations that are close to the people they serve.
In Ifangni, a commune in southeastern Benin that sits on the border with Nigeria, the evening radio programme is often the most trusted source of news in the household. When a local station explains, in the language families speak at home, what gender-based violence is and where a woman can go for help, the message lands differently than a poster or a leaflet ever could.
That insight sits at the centre of one of the projects RFLD is proud to fund this year. It also captures something we see across our whole portfolio. The organisations closest to communities often hold the most practical answers to hard problems. Yet they remain the least visible to funders, policymakers and the media.
Every month, RFLD celebrates the work of its grantees
The Beneficiary Spotlight is our response. From now on, RFLD will celebrate the work of its grantees every month. Each edition will introduce the women-led organisations, youth groups and community actors we fund across Africa, document what they do, share what we are learning alongside them and make it easier for funders, journalists and institutions to find and support them directly.
Why visibility matters for women-led organisations in Africa
Philanthropy research has made one point clear for years. Women-led organisations in Francophone Africa receive a very small share of global giving, and the gap is even wider for groups working outside capital cities. Many have strong results and deep community trust. What they often lack is a record that funders can see, read and share.
As an intermediary funder, RFLD sits between international donors and grassroots organisations. Part of our role is to move money well. Another part is to tell the story of what that money makes possible, in a way that credits the people doing the work. A monthly spotlight is a modest tool. Over time, we believe it can help shift attention, and resources, toward the organisations that deserve it.
Radio Èkaarô Ejiire and ONG SIANSON: trust that started small
Where: Ifangni and neighbouring communes, Benin
Focus: prevention of gender-based violence (GBV) through community radio and safe referral
Radio Èkaarô Ejiire’s relationship with RFLD began last year with an unrestricted mini-grant. The station could use it as it saw fit to strengthen its own development as an organisation. Unrestricted funding is still rare for small African civil society groups. It allows them to invest in what they know they need, whether that is equipment, staff or governance, instead of what a project budget allows.
This year, we are proud to be funding Radio Èkaarô Ejiire again, this time together with the NGO SIANSON. The consortium combines the reach of a multilingual community radio with SIANSON’s experience in community mobilisation. Broadcasts share clear information on GBV, on the law and on available services. SIANSON hosts supervised public spaces where women, men, young people and local leaders can talk openly about violence and the norms that keep it silent. When a survivor asks for help, she is referred safely to the social, health and justice services that already exist.
What we are learning: a small, flexible first grant can build the trust and the capacity that make a larger, more structured partnership possible a year later.
JFAD: preparing young women to lead
Where: Benin and Côte d’Ivoire
Focus: civic and political leadership of young women
Jeunes Filles Actrices de Développement (JFAD) runs a Regional Feminist Leadership Academy for young women. Participants train in advocacy, public speaking, citizenship education and political negotiation. They also learn how decisions are actually made inside institutions, from municipal councils to regional bodies.
The project builds on the JFAD Leadership Academy and on its network of girls’ voices in action. Its goal is a generation of young feminists ready to take up seats in local, national and regional governance and to shape public policy on girls’ rights for the long term.
What we are learning: leadership training has the most impact when it connects young women to real decision-making spaces, beyond the classroom.
ONG SID: making land rights real for rural women
Where: Benin and Niger
Focus: land and inheritance rights of rural women
Solidarité et Initiatives pour un Développement Durable (SID) leads TERRE & DIGNITÉ, a legal and community advocacy campaign against customary rules that deny rural women access to land and inheritance. In many villages, a widow can lose the field she has farmed for years, and a daughter can be left out when family land is shared.
SID brings mobile legal clinics to villages, works with community radio stations to explain the law in plain words and partners with traditional leaders who support change. This month, the team is finalising its visibility materials as the field phase gets under way.
What we are learning: legal reform moves faster when the people who hold customary authority are part of the solution.
WoLSI: more women at the municipal table
Where: Benin
Focus: women’s participation in local governance
Women’s Leadership for Sustainable Impact (WoLSI) runs GOVFEM, a programme that trains women community leaders in local governance and municipal decision-making through intensive political mentoring. Participants learn how a commune budget is built, how council sessions work and how to build support for a candidacy.
Communes decide on schools, health centres, markets and water points. When women sit on municipal councils, those choices tend to reflect the daily needs of families more closely.
Association BIOWA: digital safety for women defenders
Where: Benin and Senegal
Focus: digital resilience of women human rights defenders (WHRDs)
Women defenders increasingly face attacks online, from harassment on social media to hacked accounts and exposed personal data. The SHIELDHER programme of Association BIOWA gives them cybersecurity tools and training in digital hygiene, and connects them to a peer support network they can call on in an emergency.
This work echoes the guidance in RFLD’s African Digital Safety Compendium, and it responds to a need we hear from defenders across the region.
ONG CAMEF: a first door for women in their community
Where: Benin
Focus: well-being and empowerment of women
ONG CAMEF, Convergence d’Action pour le Mieux-Être et l’Épanouissement de la Femme, brings local actors together around concrete action so that women can live better and develop their full potential. With RFLD’s support, CAMEF completed its first activities this year and has moved into the next phase of its grant, in close contact with our programmes team in Porto-Novo.
Organisations like CAMEF are often the first place a woman turns to in her community. Funding them is one of the most direct ways to reach women where they live.
JERESTAURE BIEN-ÊTRE: rights education for young people
Where: Togo
Focus: rights education and support for young people from Vulnerable Groups
Through its project Droits Sans Frontières, JERESTAURE BIEN-ÊTRE helps young people from Vulnerable Groups understand and claim their rights when they seek services, education or justice. The organisation is also part of a digital civic space consortium in which RFLD is an implementing partner. This autumn, its team submitted its narrative and financial reports and is working carefully through the feedback, the kind of discipline that builds credibility with any funder.
EAH BIEN-ÊTRE: caring for those who defend others
Where: Benin and Mali
Focus: psychosocial support for women human rights defenders
Defending rights takes a heavy personal toll. Threats, isolation and exhaustion are part of daily life for many defenders, and few spaces exist where they can rest, speak and heal. EAH BIEN-ÊTRE offers that space through psychosocial support.
What we are learning: protection is incomplete without care. This was also the message of RFLD’s panel on defending without being exposed at the African Commission in October.
JFAD, SID, WoLSI, BIOWA, EAH BIEN-ÊTRE, JERESTAURE BIEN-ÊTRE and the SIANSON and Radio Èkaarô Ejiire consortium are part of RFLD’s institutional strengthening grants in Francophone West Africa. Each receives funding together with a programme of organisational strengthening. Learn more on our grantees page and on the page of the programme funded by BMZ and supported by GIZ.
Funding the spaces where African civil society speaks together
Local change also depends on regional and continental spaces where civil society can influence policy. This year, part of RFLD’s grantmaking went to those spaces.
ACDHRS and the regional NGOs Forum. The African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (ACDHRS) is a regional organisation and an RFLD grantee. RFLD funded the Forum on the Participation of NGOs, known as the NGOs Forum, which ACDHRS convened for civil society from across Africa ahead of the 89th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Dakar. The forum is where organisations from across the continent shape their joint recommendations to the Commission. Our grant helped bring more women’s organisations and more Francophone voices into the room. During the session, our panel on the protection of women human rights defenders joined the Commission’s main agenda. Watch the panel interventions. RFLD and ACDHRS are now preparing a joint delegation to CSW71 in New York in March 2027.
Activists in Nigeria. RFLD also supports activists in Nigeria who prefer not to be named. Their safety comes first, so we celebrate their courage without sharing their names or their locations.
Nalafem. Nalafem (Nala Feminist Collective), an RFLD grantee, is a pan-African movement investing in young feminist leadership and in the next generation of women in public life. This week, our teams met to plan the next steps of our work together, including an intergenerational dialogue around CSW71 and joint work on young feminist leadership in 2027.
Raise The Young Foundation. Raise The Young Foundation, an RFLD grantee, works on youth development in The Gambia. The foundation also launched a Women Mediators’ Network in Bwiam to strengthen the role of women in peacebuilding. Investing in young people today is how we prepare the women and men who will defend rights and lead institutions tomorrow, and we are proud to count Raise The Young Foundation among the organisations we celebrate this month.
Our financial support to the African Union ECOSOCC Citizens’ Forum. In 2026, RFLD gave financial support to the 5th Citizens’ Forum of the African Union Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) as a Bronze Partner. First planned in El Alamein, Egypt, the forum was finally held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, under the theme “Reimagining Global Governance: Africa and a World in Transition”. RFLD took part in the panel on AI governance, digital sovereignty and Africa’s digital public infrastructure, where we called for digital policies that protect women and defenders from technology-facilitated violence. ECOSOCC is the African Union organ that gives civil society a formal voice, and this support is part of our wider work on African Union mechanisms.
What this edition tells us
Looking across these grantees, a few lessons stand out for RFLD and, we hope, for other funders.
Proximity is an asset. A radio host who speaks the local language or a legal clinic that travels to the village holds a kind of expertise that outside actors cannot easily replace.
Flexible money builds capacity. Radio Èkaarô Ejiire’s path from an unrestricted mini-grant to a funded consortium shows how trust-based funding can prepare an organisation for larger responsibilities.
Care is part of protection. Safety tools and legal support matter, and so does the mental health of the women who stand on the front line.
Local and continental work reinforce each other. The defenders protected by BIOWA and supported by EAH BIEN-ÊTRE are the same people whose voices ACDHRS and RFLD carry to the African Commission and the African Union.
How to fund RFLD and its grantees
The organisations in this Spotlight are only part of the picture. RFLD is raising US$14 million to fund its 2026 to 2029 strategy, so that many more women-led organisations, youth groups and community actors across Africa can receive flexible grants and organisational support. Every contribution goes further when it reaches groups that are close to the people they serve, and RFLD’s regranting model is built to get it there.
Ways to give. Donors and foundations can support this work directly:
- Give to RFLD: a one-off or monthly gift to our grantmaking.
- Give from Europe: options for donors based in Europe.
- West African Feminist Fund: fund regranting to grassroots feminist groups across West Africa.
- Partner with us: for foundations, bilateral donors and companies interested in a multi-year partnership.
- GivingTuesday 2026: join our campaign to end violence against African women.
- Leave a legacy: include African women’s rights in your will.
Due diligence made simple. Before you give, you can review how RFLD works and is governed:
- Annual reports and financials
- Governance policies
- Our people: board and staff
- Impact in numbers
- Laws and policies we helped change
- Our grantees
RFLD holds an NGOsource Equivalency Determination, and US-based donors can give through RFLD’s American Friends Fund at Myriad USA, which opens access to US donor-advised funds. To discuss a partnership, write to programs@rflgd.org. For finance and due diligence questions, write to finance@rflgd.org.
Frequently asked questions
What is the RFLD Beneficiary Spotlight?
It is a monthly series in which RFLD celebrates the work of its grantees: women-led organisations, youth groups and community actors across Africa that receive funding and organisational support from RFLD.
How often is it published?
Every month. Each edition features different grantees and the lessons we draw from their work.
How can my organisation be featured or apply for support?
Organisations in the RFLD network can write to programs@rflgd.org. RFLD publishes all its open calls for grants on rflgd.org.
Looking ahead
RFLD will celebrate the work of its grantees every month. The next Beneficiary Spotlight will bring new organisations and new lessons. We invite funders to look beyond this list. Through the West African Feminist Fund and our wider regranting, RFLD channels resources to organisations that are close to communities and often far from donors. If you would like to support this work, visit our Partner with us page.
Congratulations to Radio Èkaarô Ejiire, ONG SIANSON, JFAD, SID, WoLSI, BIOWA, CAMEF, JERESTAURE BIEN-ÊTRE, EAH BIEN-ÊTRE, ACDHRS, Nalafem and Raise The Young Foundation. Our thanks also go to the ECOSOCC Secretariat. We are proud to stand with you.
Media enquiries: communications.info@rflgd.org.
