An op-ed by Iryna Koval, Head of Programs at ActionAid Eastern Europe
As winter deepens and funding shrinks, women-led organisations are sustaining the humanitarian response while defending equality in Ukraine’s Civil Code reform.
Ukrainian civilians are enduring one of the harshest winters since the start of the full-scale invasion. In some regions, temperatures have dropped to nearly –28°C (-18°F), while repeated attacks on energy infrastructure leave communities without heating, electricity, or hot water. We often speak of resilience. But resilience does not keep a home warm, nor does it replace functioning public systems.
It´s amazing how much our people can endure. Just when it feels as though nothing could surprise us anymore, new challenges emerge, each one demanding strength we did not know we still had. If before we were learning to live with nightly shelling, now we are also facing extreme cold and four or five days in a row without heating, water, gas, or electricity.
And yet, we wake up in the morning. We go to work. We check on our neighbours. We continue supporting those most at risk, because caring for one another has become our way of surviving.
This everyday resilience is not accidental. It is organized, coordinated, and sustained. What is keeping communities afloat is the relentless work of civil society, and at its core, women. With thousands of men mobilized on the front line, women have stepped into multiple roles simultaneously. They are coordinating evacuations, distributing emergency cash and winter kits, providing psychosocial and legal support, and running shelters for survivors of violence. Women volunteers and women-led organizations are sustaining the humanitarian response in cities like Dnipro and across frontline regions, often with limited resources and under constant pressure.
But their work does not stop at service delivery. At the very moment they are making daily trade-offs to stretch shrinking humanitarian budgets, women-led organizations are also engaged in one of the most consequential legal debates in Ukraine in decades: the reform of the Civil Code. The new draft legislation will absorb and replace the Family Code, reshaping the foundations of private law in the country.
This reform is not technical. It is political. It determines whose rights are protected and whose are negotiable. Women’s rights and LGBTI organisations are pushing back against provisions that could undermine equality & human rights protections. These include the possibility of maintaining marriage at the age of 14, continued barriers to equal marriage, and the exclusion of same-sex couples from any legal recognition by limiting “de facto family unions” to opposite-sex partners. In the middle of war, civil society organizations are mobilising legal expertise, advocacy networks, and public campaigns to prevent regressive legal changes that could roll back existing protections, contradict Ukraine’s European integration commitments, and entrench discrimination long after the conflict ends.
They are doing this while managing shelters. While responding to air raid sirens. While supporting traumatized families. While compensating for a state overstretched by war and for an international system whose funding is steadily declining.
Yet despite being at the forefront of both the humanitarian response and democratic accountability, women-led organizations remain structurally underfunded. According to UN Women, in 2025, around 90 % of women’s rights organizations in crisis settings reported significant impacts from funding cuts, and roughly half were at risk of closure within six months without new funding.
Recent cuts and freezes in U.S. funding have further intensified this fragility. A rapid assessment by the Gender in Humanitarian Action Working Group, conducted shortly after the suspension of United States funding in early 2025, revealed significant consequences for women’s rights: more than 60% of programs addressing gender-based violence were reduced or suspended.
The contradiction is stark. The very organizations holding communities together are left operating at the margins of decision-making and financing structures. If the international community is serious about supporting Ukraine’s future, not only its territorial integrity but its democratic and social foundations, then feminist and women-led actors must be treated as central partners, not peripheral implementers. They are not only delivering aid more equitably; they are actively shaping the legal and social contract that will define post-war Ukraine.
Resilience is not an infinite resource. It is sustained by people. And in Ukraine today, many of those people are women, holding the humanitarian line, defending equality in law, and doing so under conditions that would exhaust any system.
The question is not whether they are capable. They have proven that they are. The question is whether the international community will match their commitment with the trust and resources women deserve.
