Mwanamke means woman.
Who we are
Mwanamke Fund is a women's fund, created by women, for women, and led by women, in the countries of Africa's Great Lakes region. In Swahili, one of the region's local languages, "mwanamke" means "woman." The name alone captures the Fund's strategic choice: to place women back at the centre of the opportunities and actions that build their resilience, in a region shaken for more than thirty years by humanitarian and climate crises of every kind, crises in which women are the first to suffer.
Our ambition
To become the leading feminist grassroots fund in the African Great Lakes region: accessible to the smallest organisations, dependable for donors, and governed by the women it serves.
Our Vision
To serve in the short, medium, and long term as a local feminist fund embodying fairness, reliability, and accessibility, addressing the technical and financial challenges of women's organizations in the African Great Lakes countries.
Our Mission
Mobilize resources and provide local financial and technical support through the provision of small grants and capacity building for small organizations (led by women) that promote leadership, empowerment and the rights of vulnerable and marginalized women in the African Great Lakes countries.
The context
The African Great Lakes region concentrates some of the sharpest gender inequalities on the continent.
The African Great Lakes region is home to some of the continent's most pronounced gender inequalities: sexual violence used as a weapon of war, mass population displacement, high illiteracy rates among women, women's underrepresentation in politics, food insecurity, and climate vulnerability. While local women's organizations address this reality on a daily basis, they remain significantly underfunded due to a lack of the necessary technical, financial, and logistical capacities.
Our response
Mwanamke Fund intends to change the rules of the game, make resources accessible, and support local struggles led by local women's organisations. Its work is structured around nine programmes, defined in consultation with partner organisations.
Our position in the ecosystem
Mwanamke Fund occupies a strategic intermediary space between, on one side, large international donors and funds that cannot contract directly with grassroots organisations and, on the other, thousands of community-based women's organisations with no access to resources. Its added value rests on four strengths: geographic and linguistic proximity, feminist legitimacy, detailed knowledge of the local civil society landscape, and the ability to combine funding with accompaniment.
Our Core Values
Solidarity
We believe in the power of sisterhood and collective action
Accessibility
Our programs are designed to reach the most vulnerable
Reliability
A constant commitment to our beneficiaries
Integrity
We act with ethics and honesty
Transparency
Clear and responsible management of resources
Equity
Social justice and equal opportunities
Inclusion
No one is left behind in our action
Efficiency
Achieve concrete results
Operative
Make the best use of resources
Accountability
Reporting with transparency.
Our Range of Action
Mwanamke Fund operates in the African Great Lakes countries, a region marked by conflict but also by the extraordinary resilience of women:
- Democratic Republic of Congo
- Rwanda
- Burundi
We focus our efforts on areas most affected by humanitarian crises and gender inequality.