Empowerment Accelerated! 

 Are you a previous Voice Empowerment grantee? 

Do you still see room for growth or continuation of your empowerment journey beyond your recently completed project?  

Do you want to further work on your leadership and/or increase your, and community’s confidence to work towards full social inclusion of people affected by stigma, marginalization, and/or discrimination? 

 If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, then consider applying to this call!  

It is an opportunity to expand, deepen, challenge or bring you another step further in your own empowerment processes. 

Voice believes that when people are empowered, their self-esteem is higher. When people are happier they will be more eager to come together, to understand (each other) and to want to share their own lived experiences and lives. We want to support communities to find their own innate strength, raise their voices, and take actions to push for social change and inclusion. 

The Voice Empowerment Accelerator grants are ‘graduation’ grants meant for groups that live and breathe the principle of ‘Nothing about us, without us.’ It is also meant for groups/organizations that wish continue and/or strengthen transformative leadership skills, to build (collective and individual) confidence and skills, forge alliances with other like-minded individuals and/or organizations to address cross-cutting obstacles, and work collectively against the exclusion of marginalized and discriminated groups.  

Funding available is up to €50,000 and the lifetime of the projects under this grant should be for at least 22 months. 

 What do we wish to fund? 

Proposals with “out of the box” 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 projects should aim to work with more than one of the above groups to address overlapping vulnerabilities and/or forms of discrimination.  

All projects MUST focus on at least one or all of the following impact themes: 

• Improved access to (productive) resources such as land, and employment, 
• Improved access to social services, particularly health and education, and 
• Fostering space for political participation and citizen engagement 

Project activities may include, and not limited to the following;- 

• Build self-confidence of women (either young, old, disabled, indigenous, LBQ women) to change social relationships and the institutions, and to enhance their ability to voice at national and/or local governments  seeking accountability; 

• Build, and/or strengthen networks of marginalized groups to improve their skills, knowledge and self-perception; 
• Raise (self)awareness among the marginalized groups about their own rights and sharpen-up strategies for demanding them, for example, engaging in advocacy with stakeholders and power brokers who exercise varying degrees of control over the group; 
• Interventions that boost individual and/or groups economic status, such as promote women’s household bargaining power, youth access to employment opportunities, etc.; 
• Strengthening the collective political voice of all women movements to improve access to productive resources such as finance, water and land; 
• Civic education and public awareness campaigns to change attitudes influenced by outdated or discriminatory cultural practices within development programmes and service delivery; 

• Interventions that enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participating in all aspect of life and eliminating obstacles and barriers to accessibility; 
• An upscale of the original intervention supported by Voice and or opportunity to explore another dimension to the original dimension in response to  a new development that came up during implementation 

For more inspiration or ideas, we invite you to take a look at the different Empowerment projects supported by Voice via our Grantee page. 

Who do we wish to fund? 

The grant is meant for previous empowerment grantees whose projects have ended and contracts closed.  

Voice encourages graduation, but can only have one contract at a time with a (lead) organization.   

 Small (informal) organizations that are not yet registered should identify a fiscal host from the same area (geographical) of implementation. We are open to cover costs relating to registration in efforts to further strengthen the group/organization.  

 Geographical location 

The proposed project needs to be located in at least one of the following areas Plateau, Enugu, Lagos States & Abuja. 

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.