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International Midwife Assistance (IMA)

IMA offers general medical care, prenatal, vaccination, family planning services and a birth center, to help the poorest of the poor in the Teso region of Uganda.

IMA midwives train local practitioners provide quality prenatal and birth services, as well as general medical care, to increasing numbers of women and children from surrounding poor communities. Through these services, women receive the assistance they need to help ensure safe, healthy pregnancies. The clinic staff also conducts weekly mobile outreach clinics to remote rural areas.

Our birth center allows us to offer special assistance to women during childbirth, increasing the capacity to ensure safe delivery and quick and efficient response to complications during childbirth. Feasible low-cost health interventions are all that is needed to save countless lives of women and babies in Uganda.

For more information, visit
www.midwifeassist.org

International Midwife Assistance and
BoldeReach are 501(c)(3)
non-profit organizations

GALA TICKETS

Urgent Action Fund for
Women's Human Rights

What UAF Does

Urgent Action Fund for Women's Human Rights operates two core programs that strengthen and inform one another, enabling UAF to fund women human rights defenders quickly, strategically and effectively in diverse environments around the world.

The Rapid Response Grantmaking Program supports women and transgender activists at critical junctures, when groups are able to use funds to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and/or respond to threats. This unique model of strategic grantmaking relies on having a clear understanding of the contextual situation in which each grant is made, which UAF gains through its engagement in various human and women’s rights networks and through its Research, Publications & Advocacy program.  Urgent Action Fund conducts in-depth research projects on issues of importance to women's human rights activism.  Each publication is designed to be used as an advocacy tool in the hands of activists and their allies.
Collaborative research combined with grants analysis provides UAF with detailed, first-hand information on the realities and strategies of women activists, which we use to refine our own grantmaking program and to positively influence the field of human rights funding.  

What Is Rapid Response Grantmaking? 

Rapid Response Grantmaking (n): a funding tool used to support interventions by activists in a strategic and timely manner.  Grant requests are accepted 365 days per year, in any language, from activists around the world.  Each request receives a response within 72 hours and funds can be wired within a week.  UAF created this unique grantmaking model in 1997 to enable women activists to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, mitigate threats and/or prevent backsliding in their ongoing work to advance the human rights of all people.

When a crisis or new opportunity arises, women activists look for effective, innovative ways to respond.  Often, activists are unable to implement these strategic interventions due to a lack flexible funds, or the lengthy approval processes of many donors.

UAF was created to fill this specific need for time-urgent funding, enabling women human rights defenders to act quickly to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, mitigate threats and/or prevent backsliding in their ongoing work to advance the human rights of all people.

Urgent Action Fund provides grants to women human rights defenders without distinction of any kind as to race, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, political or other opinions, national or social origin.

Research, Publications & Advocacy

In 2003, UAF began a collaborative research project for the purpose of refining and improving our Rapid Response Grantmaking program.  Our Research, Publications & Advocacy program has developed from this initial project to become an information source for activists, funders and allies in women’s human rights activism.  The studies we conduct are instrumental in UAF’s development as a funder and we remain dedicated to the continued synergy of both programs.

Each research project undertaken by UAF arises out of our experience as a grantmaker - through the review of our grants and requests, and engagement of our activist Board of Directors, grantees and key advisors around the world.  Grantmaking is also a critical part of UAF’s research methodology, as we focus on certain themes and, in some cases, make experimental or exploratory grants around a particular issue in order to better understand and support women defenders’ work in that area.  Each publication is designed to be used as an advocacy tool in the hands of activists and their allies and is distributed in local languages whenever possible.
 

UAF is currently engaged in three projects that intertwine to provide us with a detailed and far-reaching understanding of the state of women’s human rights activism in areas of conflict and crisis.  Click on the titles of each project to read more:

The Defending the Defenders Project

UAF teamed up with Kvinna till Kvinna in Sweden and the Front Line International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Ireland to document security threats and risks that women human rights defenders experience in contexts of war/violent conflict, religious extremism, repressive or nationalist governments and post-conflict violence.

The Sustaining Activism Project

Based on interviews with over 100 activists, UAF’s forthcoming publication What’s the Point of Revolution If We Can’t Dance? explores the the creative resilience of activists around the world and the things that affect their ability to conduct their activism in healthy and sustainable ways.
The Sustaining Activism and Defending the Defenders projects represent UAF’s commitment to act on the recommendations made by women activists in our first major publication, Rising Up in Response: Women’s Rights Activism in Conflict (Barry, 2005).  One activist called Rising Up a ‘primer on UN Security Council Resolution 1325’ that she uses to advocate for women’s rights in all aspects of conflict, peacebuilding and reconstruction.

Beyond Compliance: The Philanthropy at Risk Project

This joint project involving Cordaid in The Netherlands, Grantmakers Without Borders and OMB Watch in the US, conducts ongoing monitoring and analysis of post-9/11 counterterrorism policies and their effects on global philanthropy and civil society. Read more about the Global Nonprofit Information Network.

Rising Up In Response

The Sustaining Activism and Defending the Defenders projects represent UAF’s commitment to act on the recommendations made by women activists in our first major publication, Rising Up in Response: Women’s Rights Activism in Conflict (Barry, 2005).  One activist called Rising Up a ‘primer on UN Security Council Resolution 1325’ that she uses to advocate for women’s rights in all aspects of conflict, peacebuilding and reconstruction.