Funds available across two flagship initiatives — NAFASI (Sida) and AIHRDFWA (BMZ/GIZ SEA-T) — open as part of RFLD’s continued operation as an African-led re-granter.
The Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) will award US$582,000 in re-granting capital to twenty African civil society organisations under two of the network’s flagship multi-year initiatives: NAFASI, the Sida-funded continental consortium initiative on digital civic space, and AIHRDFWA, the BMZ-funded Afrofeminist Initiative for Human Rights Development in Francophone West Africa, implemented with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) under the SEA-T flagship programme.
The award process is competitive and will be conducted on the basis of programmatic alignment, demonstrated operational capacity, and the centrality of the applicant’s work to women, youth, or vulnerable groups whose voices are structurally under-represented in continental advocacy networks.
Re-granting as African-led infrastructure
The decision to deploy a significant share of NAFASI and AIHRDFWA resources through direct re-granting — rather than retaining the funds at the lead-implementer level — is deliberate. It reflects RFLD’s institutional analysis of what African-led development actually requires in operational terms.
The architecture rests on a straightforward proposition. The financial flow from European bilateral donors to grassroots African civil society is rarely direct. It travels through chains of intermediaries, each of which extracts operational overhead and imposes its own reporting requirements. RFLD’s role, as an African pan-continental network with offices in Porto Novo, Dakar, Accra, and Banjul, is to compress that chain — to receive institutional grants from BMZ, GIZ, Sida, and other donors, and to redeploy those resources to organisations whose proximity to the work makes them most effective.
RFLD has been progressively expanding its re-granting capacity since 2019. The network is one of a small number of African-led organisations with the institutional infrastructure — NGOsource 501(c)(3) Equivalency Determination certified, ACHPR Observer Status, GIZ/BMZ SEA-T flagship cohort participation, US$1.77 million delivered in 2025 with 85 per cent direct to field activities — to function as a re-granter at this scale.
NAFASI — Defending Africa’s digital civic space
The first set of awards will be issued under NAFASI, a thirty-six-month consortium initiative running from 2026 to 2029. NAFASI is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and led by Magamba Network (Zimbabwe), with DefendDefenders (Uganda) and RFLD Ghana Regional Office as implementing partners.
NAFASI — Swahili for space — is a continental commitment to defend the space, online and offline, where civil society, journalists, and women human rights defenders do their work. The initiative advances on three pillars: policy and governance frameworks against digital repression, including engagement with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and parliaments across the continent; digital resilience and truth, including a 24/7 emergency response helpline and gender-responsive cybersecurity training; and network power, connecting fragmented digital activism into a coordinated continental network.
RFLD’s role within the consortium is the Feminist and Francophone Bridge — leveraging the network’s continental presence to ensure interventions are gender-responsive and inclusive of francophone West and Central Africa, with a specialised mandate for high-level diplomatic advocacy, the protection of Women Human Rights Defenders, and gender mainstreaming to counter Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence.
The RFLD NAFASI awards will be directed toward organisations operating in the francophone and lusophone digital civil society space — regions that mainstream pan-African digital rights consortia, anchored in anglophone East and Southern Africa, have historically under-served. Eligible applicants include organisations working on digital security training, the protection of women human rights defenders facing technology-facilitated violence, environmental justice for women defenders facing corporate surveillance pressure, and policy advocacy at the national, regional, and continental levels.
AIHRDFWA — Afrofeminist Human Rights Development in Francophone West Africa
The second set of awards will be issued under AIHRDFWA, a thirty-month flagship initiative led by RFLD and funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) with implementing support from GIZ. The initiative runs from 2025 to 2028 and operates across eight francophone West African countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo.
AIHRDFWA addresses the simultaneous narrowing of civic space and the increasing exposure of women human rights defenders to political, digital, and physical threat across francophone West Africa. The initiative’s results framework rests on four objectives: strengthened human rights institutions and mechanisms; enhanced advocacy and awareness for women human rights defenders and the civil society organisations they lead; targeted programming for vulnerable and marginalised groups; and strengthened democratic participation and civil society engagement.
RFLD is the lead implementer — not a sub-grantee. The AIHRDFWA awards will be directed toward feminist civil society organisations capable of delivering on the initiative’s five operational measures: inclusive policy advocacy at national, regional, and continental levels; digital resilience for women human rights defenders; cross-border solidarity networks; targeted human rights programming for vulnerable groups; and democratic participation and civic education.
Eligible applicants include grassroots feminist groups working across the eight project countries, with a particular interest in regions where civic space has narrowed most acutely in recent years. The April 2026 dissolution of 118 NGOs in Burkina Faso illustrates the operating environment in which this resource flow takes on heightened significance: where states tighten the regulatory framework for civil society, regional re-granting through African-led intermediaries becomes one of the few financial pathways that can sustain front-line work.
Eligibility and selection
The total envelope of US$582,000 will be distributed in grant sizes calibrated to the institutional needs and absorption capacity of each recipient — sufficient to provide meaningful institutional support without distorting the recipient organisation’s existing strategic direction.
To be eligible, applicant organisations must demonstrate:
- Programmatic alignment with the strategic objectives of either NAFASI (digital civic space, gender-responsive digital rights, protection of women human rights defenders) or AIHRDFWA (feminist civil society strengthening, women’s human rights, inclusive policy advocacy in francophone West Africa)
- Geographic presence in countries served by the relevant initiative
- Operational capacity to deliver in the proposed thematic and geographic focus, evidenced by governance documents, audited or reviewed financials, and references
- Centrality of women, youth, or vulnerable groups to the organisation’s mission and operational practice
- Institutional integrity, including documented safeguarding policies, financial controls, and ethics frameworks proportionate to the organisation’s scale
Looking ahead
The twenty awards will be operational across the implementation period of the parent initiatives — through 2028 for AIHRDFWA and through 2029 for NAFASI. RFLD will publish annual progress reports documenting the work of the recipient organisations and synthesising the systemic insights that emerge from their work.
The deeper significance of this announcement is structural rather than financial. RFLD operates, in this cycle, as an African-led grant-making institution — receiving from BMZ, GIZ, and Sida, and disbursing to African civil society organisations on the basis of RFLD’s own assessment of programmatic fit and operational capacity. The chain is shorter. The decisions are taken closer to the work. The accountability runs both ways: RFLD is accountable to the donors for the prudent management of the resources, and accountable to the recipient organisations for the quality and timeliness of the support provided.
This is what the localisation discourse has, for at least a decade, claimed to want. The quiet point in this announcement is that the institutional architecture for it already exists, and that it can be built where it has not yet been built.
About RFLD. The Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement is a pan-African feminist network founded in 2013 and registered in Senegal, Benin, Ghana, and The Gambia. The network unites 1,143 member organisations across more than fifteen African countries and serves on the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Working Group on Human Rights Defenders. RFLD chairs the SEA-T Council 2026 and is NGOsource 501(c)(3) Equivalency Determination certified.
Media contact. Communications team — communications.info@rflgd.org
Partnership enquiries. John Gbenagnon, Director of Strategy & Development — gbenagnon.john@rflgd.org
Programme enquiries. Programmes team — programs@rflgd.org
