Strategies
Shift from individual to eco-system responses
Embrace opportunities to support ecosystems of frontline responders to build collective capacity and make a collective impact.
Why It Matters
Different approaches and strategies are essential to both respond to urgent moments of crisis and address the long-term problems that got us there.
Weaving together complementary strategies means that movements are able to better meet the needs of their diverse communities
What It Looks Like In Practice
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is experiencing overlapping crises. Armed conflict is driving mass displacement and rising sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Illegal mining, land grabbing, flooding, and food shortages compound the harm, falling hardest on rural and Indigenous women and women with disabilities.
Local feminist organisations are responding, resisting, and rebuilding. To support their work, Urgent Action Fund-Africa provides rapid, flexible, and feminist-led grants that support organisations working on safety, healing, justice, and advocacy. Between 2023 and 2025, Urgent Action Fund-Africa awarded over 80 grants to organisations and individual activists in the DRC. Rather than funding a single type of response, Urgent Action Fund-Africa funds diverse groups that weave together complementary strategies.
By funding intersecting needs, Urgent Action Fund-Africa enables movements to meet their communities where they actually are at. In practice, this means grassroots groups providing relocation support and access to justice for survivors of sexual violence; community organisations running collective healing spaces and economic justice programmes; and networks advocating for the rights of women activist leaders whose safety is increasingly under threat. Environmental and climate justice, from resisting land grabbing to responding to flooding, is an important thread alongside work on sexual and reproductive health and rights and disability justice.