$29 Million Dollar Grant Program To Help Afghan Women

*Please note that the due date of this grant program is January 29, 2009!

This grant program was implemented to help empower Afghanistan women.

While this specific grant program is not to help the women individually it does provide grants for those organizations to provide grants to Afghanistan women!

Because it is now their constitutional right to be provided equal rights for women, they now have an official framework to support their personal and professional development. However, all indicators of women’s status reveal that enforcement of constitutional rights lags far behind enactment. A combination of poverty and deprivation, ill health, illiteracy, discriminatory customary laws, harmful traditional practices, and physical and emotional abuse conspire to keep women at the bottom of society.

To ensure they receive sufficient attention, women’s organizations are needed to advocate on behalf of these women and help mobilize resources, deliver essential services, and implement useful development activities. However, some of these organizations cannot effectively undertake these tasks until they acquire a wide range of new skills—from assessing needs, designing responsive interventions, and implementing programs to managing operations, finances and people, building alliances and networks, planning strategically, and monitoring and evaluating performance—in addition to building capacity in the technical sectors in which they wish to work.

This three-year $26.7 million program is designed to strengthen the capacity of these organizations to contribute to the social, economic, and political development of Afghan women through the provision of financial and technical assistance to support women-specific activities in the following areas:

• Implementing activities that improve the status, safety and well being, human and legal rights, and livelihoods of Afghan women and girls
  
  
• Delivering services that directly address the social, political, and economic needs of Afghan women and girls
  
  
• Undertaking efforts to increase the participation of Afghan women in development as implementers, change agents and beneficiaries
  
  
• Creating or strengthening mechanisms and channels by which Afghan women can access information, network, and take advantage of personal and professional development opportunities.

Applicants will propose approaches to implementing the following Activity Components and indicate how those approaches will help accomplish the Activity Objectives:

1. Awarding sub-grants for technical and organizational capacity building of eligible organizations, including equipment, and for the activities of such organizations
   
   
2. Assessing organizational and technical capacity needs of eligible organizations and developing responsive interventions
   
   
3. Overseeing sub-grant implementation to ensure that in addition to successful implementation of activities, the organization's institutional strengthening and technical capacity building within recipient organizations is achieved
   
   
4. To support the above components, developing and implementing a comprehensive communications plan and strategy to generate widespread interest in the sub-grant program among the women’s organizations and to develop and manage an information campaign about the program to inform other stakeholders.

The following link will take prospective applicants who are interested in this high visibility program to the full solicitation. Be sure to click on the link that says "Download Application Instructions.”

Did you know that there is a charitable organization that provides homes for injured veterans? Successful applicants will not even have to pay a mortgage on their free home! They will be provided homes free of ANY mortgage!