The Fund for SupportingLocal Women'sActivism was established in 2019 to address the critical gap in providing specialized support for advancing women's rights and gender equality in North Macedonia. Since its inception, the Fund has transformed the local women's activism landscape. By investing in the development needs and advocacy capacities of local women’s organizations and communities, it has helped create the vibrant and connected Women's Circle, which promotes an autonomous, direct, and organized women’s voice advocating for women's rights and gender equality. Through advocacy actions, local women have achieved numerous improvements, expanded opportunities for women, and challenged gender norms and power dynamics in their communities.
Local women’s organizations often face limited access to resources, funding, and networking opportunities. Especially outside the capital, many of them lack adequate support for organizational development, receive only short-term and narrowly focused grants, and have few opportunities for national-level participation and advocacy. These challenges, combined with weak connections to the local women’s community, restrict their advocacy potential and operational continuity. the Fund was created to fill this gap and provide sustainable, flexible support that empowers local women’s organizations to effectively advance women’s rights and gender equality.
The Fund is unique in that it provides long-term, flexible, and tailored support to local women’s organizations—crucial for their sustainability, growth, and impact. Its core principles include horizontal collaboration, community involvement in planning, decentralization of resources and knowledge, mutual respect, shared responsibility for change, and community ownership of results.
Through the Fund, organizations receive a combination of three key types of support—enabling them to focus on internal and external development, advocacy efforts, and the empowerment of marginalized women for civic engagement.
Three-year flexible programmatic and budgetary support, along with strengthening grassroots support networks within women’s communities.
Support for piloting field methodologies that empower women from rural or marginalized urban areas, expanding the local women’s circles network, advocating their initiatives, and backing thematic advocacy strategies at both local and national levels.
Support for informal women’s groups working on autonomous, community-level initiatives.
Support for initiatives that mobilize resources to improve conditions and opportunities for women in local communities.
Specialized Intra-Organizational Trainings - Tailored training sessions based on self-assessed development needs of supported organizations, including capacity-building on fieldwork methodologies developed by Akcija Zdruzhenska. The support also includes thematic trainings to enhance the effectiveness and impact of advocacy work, meetings with national stakeholders (institutions, the international community, donors), as well as regional networking and exchange gatherings.
Meetings that connect and encourage exchange among activists from different communities, aimed at building solidarity, education, and sharing of advocacy approaches and lessons learned. These gatherings also involve planning advocacy strategies, jointly assessing contextual challenges, and evaluating changes achieved through local advocacy.
Annual meetings of the network of supported organizations and local women’s circles from all communities. These meetings foster solidarity, education, sharing of advocacy practices and learned lessons, collective strategy planning, contextual analysis, and reflection on progress made through support from the Fund.
Association for advancement of gender equality Akcija Zdruzenska - Skopje
