Company Profile
Global Fund for Women
Company Overview
Global Fund for Women envisions a world where every woman and girl is strong safe, powerful, and heard. No exceptions. We are a global champion for the rights of women and girls, using grantmaking and advocacy to propel global movements for women’s rights. As a public foundation, we rely on the generous support of thousands of donors each year to support our mission and to help us achieve our organizational goals. This position plays an important role in supporting a new strategic plan goal of diversifying and growing our funding.
Company History
Global Fund for Women was founded in 1987 in Palo Alto, California, by four bold women: Anne Firth Murray, Frances Kissling, Laura Lederer, and Nita Barrow. They were convinced that women’s human rights were essential to social, economic, and political change around the world, for the benefit of us all. Frustrated by a lack of interest in funding women’s human rights, they founded an organization to fund grass-roots women-led movements directly. They knew that by trusting their grantee partners to tackle the problems they were uniquely qualified to solve, permanent change would happen. They were right.
Founding member Anne Firth Murray served as our Founding President from 1986 to 1996. Anne established Global Fund for Women as a leader in women’s rights funding and expertise.
From the start, Global Fund for Women was a public foundation, relying on the generosity of donors to support its critical work. The work caught the public’s attention. The first grants in 1988 totaled $30,000, but by 1996 grantmaking had grown to $1.2 million.
Kavita Ramdas became CEO in 1996, serving until 2010. Under Kavita’s leadership, Global Fund for Women experienced unprecedented growth, with assets increasing from $6 million to $21 million. Her powerful advocacy and thought leadership won hearts and minds, and mobilized resources and attention for women’s rights.
Musimbi Kanyoro joined the organization in 2011. Under her leadership, Global Fund for Women celebrated a major milestone – surpassing $100 million in total grantmaking. Musimbi focused the organization’s program areas and added more comprehensive learning, monitoring, and evaluation.
In March 2014, Global Fund for Women and the International Museum of Women (IMOW) merged. The merger brought together Global Fund for Women’s powerful grantmaking and advocacy expertise with IMOW’s skills in awareness raising, online campaigns, and digital storytelling.
IMOW was founded in 1997, led by Founding President Elizabeth Colton, and evolved into an innovative online museum inspiring creativity, awareness, and action on vital global issues for women. Elizabeth joins the lineage of founders of the merged organization.
Though Global Fund for Women has changed with the times, the philosophy of our founders has remained: trust women. Women are the best agents of change in their communities, and giving them resources and voice can change the world.
Notable Accomplishments / Recognition
Since 1987, Global Fund for Women has invested in nearly 5,000 women-led groups across 175 countries, helping win rights for millions of women and girls.
During our 27 year history, we’ve supported women’s rights organizations to end civil wars, get female Presidents elected, and secure laws giving new protection to millions. We started the first girls’ global education fund and ignited important movements to bring an end to trafficking and to create workers’ rights. We’ve also helped to seed and grow over two dozen women’s funds all around the world.
A 2013 evaluation by Stanford University and SVT Group found that Global Fund for Women had seeded, strengthened, and propelled work for women’s rights all over the world:
Seeding – we were the first institutional funder to more than 700 organizations and a key early funder for hundreds more.
Strengthening – our flexible funding has been essential to building small organizations, especially those in conflict areas such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Colombia, and the former Yugoslavia.
Propelling movements – our work has played an important role in sustaining, linking, and mobilizing the following movements:
Gender-Based Violence; Reproductive Rights; LGBTI Rights; Domestic Worker Rights; Ending Sex Trafficking; Disability Rights; the Rights of Sex Workers; Indigenous and Rural Women’s Rights; and Anti-war/Peace-building. These movements have achieved lasting and measurable gains – for example, we supported women’s groups to change or introduce laws on gender-based violence in 25 countries, providing protection for over 1.05 billion women and girls.
Through our impact framework, we are able to carefully evaluate our work, learn from the experiences of our grantee partners, and constantly improve what we do.