Power to Lead - a shared call to action

Oxfam and ActionAid are championing feminist humanitarian leadership through flexible, trust-based funding that empowers women-led and women’s rights organisations in Ukraine and the occupied Palestinian territory to lead crisis response on their own terms.

Executive summary

This Call to Action emerges from a joint learning exchange that brought together Women’s Rights Organisations (WROs) from the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) and Ukraine. The crises they are responding to are rooted in distinct histories and political realities, but the exchange also revealed important commonalities in the structural barriers WROs face within the humanitarian system. 

The exchange created space for WROs to recognise shared challenges, learn from one another’s strategies, and name the changes they want to see from donors, international NGOs, and humanitarian actors. 

WROs in oPt and Ukraine are already showing what feminist humanitarian leadership looks like in practice. The question is not whether they have the expertise, access or legitimacy to lead, but whether donors, international NGOs and humanitarian actors are willing to change the systems and practices that continue to constrain their leadership. Drawing on their experiences, reflections and shared priorities, participating WROs identified five collective Calls to Action that set out what needs to change for WROs to be trusted, adequately resourced and recognised as equal partners.

• Fund WROs directly, flexibly and long-term
• Treat WROs as leaders and partners, not contractors
• Simplify access, compliance and language requirements
• Fund the full cost of safe, sustainable humanitarian work
• Invest in collective power, solidarity and feminist learning

Oxfam and ActionAid have worked in partnership to invest in flexible, feminist funding approaches that support Women’s Rights Organisations and Women-Led Organisations working in humanitarian crises. This commitment has been put into practice through distinct but connected programs: WISE in the occupied Palestinian territory and the Women’s Humanitarian Leadership Fund in Ukraine. Both programs have received support from the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), alongside other sources of funding. These initiatives combine flexible resources with organisational strengthening, peer learning, and spaces for collective reflection.

Rather than asking organisations to fit narrow, pre-defined project models, this approach supports WROs and WLOs to identify their own priorities and use funding in ways that respond to their realities, from sustaining services and retaining staff, to strengthening internal systems, investing in safety and wellbeing, building advocacy, supporting communities and maintaining the organisational foundations that make longer-term humanitarian response possible. Learning from the first phase of the Women’s Humanitarian Leadership Fund in Ukraine is captured in Women’s Humanitarian Leadership Fund: Lessons on Power, Trust and Impact. For Oxfam and ActionAid, this is a practical investment in feminist humanitarian leadership: supporting WROs and WLOs not only as responders, but as organisations with the knowledge, legitimacy and leadership needed to shape humanitarian response and recovery.