LEARNING & INNOVATIONS
The Learning & Innovations Portfolio identifies and engages with emerging issues of relevance to UAF-Africa’s mission and vision while keeping abreast of ongoing discourse in the field of African women’s rights. Positing herself as a learning organization that looks to learn from the valuable experience of partners and grantees, UAF-Africa closely monitors grant applications in order to get a palpable sense of country-level or regional trends on the ground and works on innovative approaches to engage and report on such trends. It is through this follow up that UAF-Africa aims to identify key gaps in knowledge and research for policy in the field of women’s human rights on the continent.
Strategically positioning herself as a learning organisation, UAF-Africa also works with her grantees in a participatory manner, seeing herself as an equal partner that aims to learn and grow from the lived realities of her grantees. It is also through following the work of grantees and partners that the Fund identifies innovative approaches devised to tackle the plethora of challenges facing African women, as well as strategies that women utilize to seize strategic opportunities that have the potential of furthering African women’s rights. The latter learning process furthers UAF-Africa’s vision of herself as a part of the whole; as such learning outcomes would eventually benefit human rights organizations and the public by feeding into regional advocacy discourse and the development of good practice around issues concerning women’s rights in Africa. The portfolio also facilitates the development of a learning, monitoring, evaluation and reporting policy that is designed around UAF-Africa’s unique rapid response grant making mechanism, which explores the effectiveness and efficiency of our model towards fulfilling the overarching goal of advocating for women’s rights.
