Without resources in women's hands, decision-making power cannot truly shift. When men continue to control the resources, they continue to hold the power and that is the real fight for equality.

It's all right to say that through our livelihoods program, we are affecting two million women. But you still may not be addressing gender as an identity and as a social construct to examine how the project is challenging power dynamics in the family, community or the village. A gender lens can only be brought in if it's intentional and if it's called out. Otherwise, it remains intentionally hidden.

There has been a shift away from corpus funding toward more project-based support, which influences the scope and depth of work. With program priorities often shaped externally, opportunities for long-term, transformative work particularly across gender, caste, and other intersecting inequalities can be difficult to sustain.

Leadership and equity-oriented work faces real funding challenges and is more likely to attract support when connected to outcomes in education, health, or livelihoods. Similarly, resilience-building work tends to be underfunded despite its importance. Women and girls on the ground demonstrate extraordinary resilience, and communities show their own capacity for leadership and knowledge but translating this into lasting change depends on sustained, long-term support.

Gender is like that old portrait in your home � you walk past it every day, you know it's there, but you keep chasing the shiny new thing that just arrived. It still needs cleaning.

Gender work must be grounded in intersectionality. Women are not a homogeneous category, and any meaningful engagement with gender equality must account for the layered realities of caste, class, geography, disability, and sexual identity. The intersecting identities of the women, men, boys, girls, and sexual and gender minorities we work with shape the nature of their vulnerabilities as much as their possibilities. This specificity must be reflected in how we frame, fund, and deliver our work.

Gender is often applied as a horizontal lens for CSR programs. Skilling programs typically carry a criterion of 50% women. The unintended consequence of course, is that 50% is considered good enough. Relatively few programs take a gender-first approach.

We will not reduce the women in our communities to a dollar or a pound. In the exercise of writing and submitting applications, we often end up filling administrative forms focused on multiple compliance and logic frameworks. What we would like is for funders to make their processes enabling so that we can deeply focus on conceptualizing a program for transformative social change.

Typically, certain kinds of organisations are underfunded/less visible. These include youth-led organizations, organisations led by and working with the LGBTQI community, and grassroots community-based organisations esp. those located in rural India. Often there is hesitation and lack of confidence due to barriers of location and language (not just of English, powerpoints etc. but also in how to present decades of work which may seems cyclical and slow with incremental changes over long periods of time). It is essential that donors visit these remote programme areas to grasp the context and complexity of issues on ground.

Feminist organisations led by Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, queer, trans, and disability rights communities, particularly outside metropolitan areas, remain chronically underfunded, despite leading some of the most transformative and intersectional work on gender justice. This is especially true for efforts to address caste-based violence, structural discrimination, and access to justice for marginalised communities. If we are serious about systems change, we must invest in the movements driving it. Likewise, while global attention to the care economy, social protection and unpaid care work is growing, this is yet to translate into sustained financing.

One of the big changes in the last five years has been the shift in the foreign funding landscape. There has been a withdrawal of foreign funders, and even among those that remain, there's been significant shrinkage of funding. Funds that used to flow downward through intermediaries are no longer available to smaller women's rights organizations that don't have direct access to foreign funders. This has meant that access to foreign funding, which was typically more gender transformative, has diminished.