The landscape of women’s rights in India is patchy and uneven. We have witnessed significant improvements in the educational attainment of girls and women. However, our female labour workforce participation rates have been declining steadily. India is pursuing the goal of becoming a 5 trillion-dollar economy but ranks a poor 122 out of 162 on the gender inequality index. According to the report of the National Crimes Record Bureau, crimes against women have drastically increased, with domestic violence being the highest among all reported forms of violence against women. 

Women face several structural and social barriers in accessing justice and rights. The legal system is intimidating and corrupt; and social norms discriminate women from seeking equal rights within and outside the family. Only 12 percent of parliamentary seats are held by women and while a million women have been elected to panchayats, they have to struggle against widely prevalent patriarchal mindsets and gender stereotypes, in asserting their authority. 

During the last decade and a half, several policy measures have been put in place to address the needs of survivors of violence. However the implementation of these policy measures have been uneven and irregular. Further, they are not always compliant with international standards. Much remains to be done to ensure women’s equality by reducing gender based vulnerabilities and ending all forms of violence against women.

A range of organisations and collectives, pan India, are addressing women’s rights in diverse ways and providing services as well as rights-based training for vulnerable women. These interventions are enabling women to gain access to government programmes, paid work, skill building and other entitlements that advance women’s condition and status. However, these organisations are severely under-resourced and under-represented.  Their access to broader platforms and resources, both financial and non-financial, is constrained and challenged. 

The development of a women’s fund in India has the potential to strengthen women’s mobilisation by harnessing new resources towards the advancement of women’s rights. The Fund can nurture philanthropy to flow towards organisations struggling under financial constraints to advance women’s rights.  She can also support the incubation of innovative models as well as raise funds for scaling up  best practices and pilot interventions developed by women’s groups across the country.

South Asia Women Foundation India (SAWF IN) thus aims to create a platform to advance women’s rights by facilitating the flow of resources to areas and constituencies that are most in need of flexible, sustained support. It is currently the only women’s fund in India.

South Asia Women Foundation India (SAWF IN)  was put forward as an idea by the Indian Board members of the Board of Directors of the South Asia Women’s Fund (SAWF, presently the Women’s Fund Asia) in 2013, and registered in August 2015 in India as a not-for-profit Company under section 8 of the Indian Companies Act 2013. SAWF IN was set up with the full recognition of the challenges that indigenous philanthropy poses to feminist rights work: 

1. It is significantly occupied by welfarist services and charity. 
2. The emerging new actors are from a strong corporate background, with access to big tracts of money on one hand, yet little expertise of human rights or feminist organising. 
3. State funding for social justice work on women’s human rights has been dwindling 
4. Feminist processes are absent from the manner in which grant-making is undertaken.
5. There is little attention to intersection approaches, centring women’s human rights, ensuring inclusion of voices from the community that is being marginalised, amongst other lenses.

Therefore, the founders of SAWF IN built the organisation not only to raise money, and undertake grant making through feminist processes; but also to undertake donor influencing and education of rights work, and facilitate resource justice within the indigenous philanthropy sector as well.

SAWF IN emerged as an organic movement forward from SAWF to meet the demands of a complex, diverse and dynamic development landscape in India. Mandated to influence greater philanthropic commitments to gender justice work, SAWF IN aims to make resources more accessible to gender rights organisations working at the grassroots. SAWF IN also incubates interesting models of change on the ground, working with the most excluded groups and initiatives advancing women and trans* persons rights and leaderships, ensuring they receive engaged support.

We support work in the areas of economic participation of women & trans* persons and their access to justice. These are undoubtedly our focus areas, the two glaring gaps we see. We recognise that there are violation of rights on so many different fronts, whether it is education, sexual and reproductive health, access to technology and digital literacy. But believe these two areas are critical in shifting power, making it our focus point.