Resourcing Civil Society Organizations Expanding Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health

The continuity of access to Sexual and Reproductive Health for vulnerable women, girls, and gender-diverse people in the Global South is at a critical juncture in the face of major international aid funding cuts and the prevalence of anti-rights movements. Civil society organizations who typically fill critical access gaps in their local contexts by providing vital care at highly affordable prices or free of cost for the most marginalized groups have historically depended on aid and donor funding to carry out this important work. In a context of growing scarcity for this kind of funding, these organizations need to find new ways to generate revenue and turn a profit by creating valuable and innovative solutions for paying customers that can help subsidize the care they offer to vulnerable groups.

For more than 70 years, Fòs Feminista has been working closely with civil society organizations in the Global South—now an alliance of 170+ partners—to resource, accompany and support them across three major pillars: i) expanding sexual and reproductive health care and services; ii) transforming laws, policies, and social norms; and iii) strengthening feminist movements and organizations. A pivotal component of Fòs Feminista’s work with our partners, is to strengthen them to become more resilient and financially sustainable so they can continue to carry out their important work without interruptions. This is why one decade ago, we started fostering social entrepreneurship approaches whereby we support organizations to engage in mission-aligned revenue-generating activities that help bolster their work and subsidize activities for the most vulnerable groups at times where donor funding is scarce and fickle.

In this vein, we offer our partners blended funding that combines social enterprise grants to launch and improve promising revenue-generating models with sexual and reproductive health solutions that expand access to care, and repayable financing through our own programmatic Feminist Impact Fund in the form of low-interest concessional loans to grow and scale established and successful initiatives. To date, we have invested $1.5M in grants and worked with 30 partners as they start and launch their social enterprise initiatives, and $4M in 16 low-interest loans.

We couple our funding efforts with specialized technical accompaniment which we offer from our in-house Innovation and Social Enterprise Lab, which has a series of structured time-bound programs for partners to ideate and incubate initiatives, one-on-one accompaniment to improve and accelerate initiatives for investment-readiness, and virtual learning spaces to develop and strengthen capacities and skills in financial leadership and strategy, implementing financial solid systems, costing products and services, business modeling, and marketing and communications, among others.

To date, since 2020 when we launched our Innovation and Social Enterpris we have invested $1.5M in grants and worked with 30 civil society partners as they launch and test their social enterprise initiatives that expand access to sexual and reproductive health, and $3.9M in 16 low-interest loans for civil society partners scaling and growing successful initiatives. Since 2021, when we launched our fund our loan portfolio has collectively generated the delivery of 688,000 additional SRH services and 61,700 contraceptives to 97,000 users in the Global South. These investments have collectively generated USD $5.3M in revenue for our partners.