Let’s make it Louder!

The shift in the country’s political landscape continues to hamper the civic space for rightsholders to amplify their voices and influence decision-makers, coupled with increasing vulnerabilities brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing stigma, discrimination, and inequality.  We continue to hear issues around loss of income and insecurity affecting individuals’ ability to support their needs, including their families’. This has also impacted the confidence and capabilities of the different rightsholder groups, including their capacity to call for meaningful participation in various economic empowerment processes and initiatives. Voice believes that collectively, we must undertake appropriate strategies and innovative approaches to address this challenge. We call on civil society groups and organisations to make our efforts louder!  

Do you have any fresh, inclusive, and bold ideas to boost the current economic empowerment for the most vulnerable rightsholder groups? Do you want to try something new and innovative to support the rightsholder groups?  Have you tested a new approach but haven’t had time or resources to document, reflect and learn? Do you want to try using artivism (art for activism) to amplify the voices of your groups? Do you want to scale up and disseminate an innovative approach but with a different rightsholder group or geographical area?  

 If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then we encourage you to apply and try something new.  

 What are we looking for?  

Voice is looking for innovative ideas to forge stronger influencing approaches from grassroots to the national level, addressing inequalities and boosting the economic empowerment of the rightsholder groups most impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. This call is specifically looking for projects or ideas that test innovative approaches around economic empowerment, access to social services and social protection particularly of women and girls across all the rightsholder groups.  

Moreover, Innovate and Learn grants focus on organisations that want to learn from innovation and/or testing and scaling new approaches. Voice focuses less on technology but prefers human-centred innovations that are context-specific and relevant to empowering, amplifying, and/or influencing the voice of the rightsholder groups. In this call, we strongly encourage applications that incorporate creative methodologies such as the use of sports, theatre performances (films, music, dance, and drama), poetry, comedy, painting as well as the use of digital platforms and social media. The grant hopes to capture and stimulate learning from these methods to develop future evidence-based programming at national, regional, and global levels. 

What do we wish to fund? 

Proposals with “innovative” project ideas that promote learning and focus on underrepresented groups within the following Voice rightsholder groups; 

• People with disabilities 
• Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people 
• Indigenous People and ethnic minorities 
• Vulnerable elderly and youth 
• Women facing exploitation, abuse, and/or violence 

Voice has a strong preference for projects that are designed from an intersectional point of view. This means that projects should aim to work with the intersection of two or more of the above groups to address overlapping vulnerabilities and/or forms of discrimination. For example, if the project aims to work with persons with disabilities, it is also possible to consider engaging women with disabilities, indigenous youth with disabilities, LGBTI with disabilities, and others. 

 The main impact theme to which the proposals should gear towards is the rightsholder’s improved access to (productive) resources (e.g. finance, land, and water) and employment. It could also be linked with the other impact themes of Voice: 

• Improved access to social services, particularly health and education 
• Fostering space for political participation and citizen engagement 

Furthermore, Voice encourages networks, partnerships, and consortia applications because each organisation may bring new ideas to the project and each partner can learn from the other.  You may also wish to partner with “unusual suspects” like media companies, campaigners, and artists who may encourage new ways of advocacy and influence.  

 Still in need of more inspiration or ideas? We invite you to take a look at the different Innovate and Learn projects supported by Voice via our Grantee page. 

 Innovate and learn grants are available from €5,000 to €200,000 and from 18 to 24 months in duration. 

 What kind of activities will not be funded? 

Please note that Voice will NOT fund initiatives that focus on the provision of cash or any forms of financial and/or in-kind support to the project participants. For this Call, strengthening economic empowerment may be centered on supporting the participation of the rightsholders groups, testing mechanisms and structures to enable them to have increased access to productive services, strengthening capacities, and other similar approaches. 

 Voice is a non-institutional development fund and does not support any of the following: 

• Infrastructure building; 
• Purchase of heavy-duty equipment (transportation vehicles, agricultural machines, security equipment); 
• Humanitarian COVID-19 response; 
• Disaster relief 
• Funding of commercial services, investment, or other commercial activities. 

 We will also NOT fund organisations with an annual turnover of over €2 million.   

 Please take our eligibility test to make sure that you qualify for the grant. 

 Where do we wish to fund?  

Voice has a strong preference for projects that intend to work at the existing target areas including Battambong, Banteay Meanchey, Siem Reap, Kampong Chnang, Kampong Cham, Svay Reang, Takeo, Rattanakiri and Phnom Penh.  

This Call for Proposals is closed and no longer accepting applications. Come back here at a later stage to learn about the grantees that have been selected in this Call for Proposals.

The current open Calls for Proposals can be found here.