This report captures our effort to turn commitments on localization and support for women’s leadership into action – a learning journey that aimed to test, adapt, and innovate through trust-based, flexible funding.
The Women’s Humanitarian Leadership Fund (WHLF) was created to put this vision into practice. In its first phase in Ukraine, ActionAid and Oxfam, together with 12 Women’s Rights Organizations (WROs), tested a simple yet transformative idea: trust WROs to decide how best to spend humanitarian resources to support affected communities. Through flexible, core-style funding and light, transparent processes, the WHLF gave WROs the autonomy to act quickly, adapt to shifting realities, and strengthen their organizations from within.
Piloting the WHLF was made possible by funding from the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), as part of its commitment to advancing locally led and feminist approaches in the humanitarian response in Ukraine. The concept for the fund builds on growing evidence from localization research in Ukraine, which highlighted persistent barriers to equitable partnerships, decision-making power, and direct funding for local and women-led actors. These studies underscored the need for new funding models that move beyond rhetoric to tangible redistribution of power and resources, the precise gap that the WHLF was designed to address.
The results of rolling this out in practice are clear. Even small, short-term grants generated outsized impact: increasing institutional capacity, supporting staff wellbeing, and advocacy influence. Partners described the experience as “a partnership, not control” – a rare example of equitable collaboration in a sector still predominantly shaped by control-driven, non-contextualized compliance and distorted power dynamics. The pilot initiative also revealed limits: short timelines and modest scale constrained deeper, long-term change. But the lesson is unmistakable: flexible, feminist funding works.