Main points
- International guidance increasingly calls for context-sensitive, gender-responsive and locally-led approaches to anti-corruption. Global Fund for Women Grassroots Feminist Anti-Corruption Learning project illustrated a practical way of doing this – it was grounded in the lived experiences of those most affected by corruption and attentive to power dynamics at community level.
- Grassroots feminist organisations experience corruption as an abuse of entrusted power exercised in coercive and discriminatory ways such as sexual corruption, extortion, the denial of services, and bureaucratic or political gatekeeping. In many contexts these practices are connected to violence, intimidation, and exclusion.
- These organisations are accountability actors in their own right. They document, monitor, refer cases, and support survivors, and they use methods such as theatre, sport, and community dialogue to name and resist corruption where formal institutions are absent, distrusted, or unsafe to approach.
- Flexible, unrestricted funding allowed organisations to adjust activities, budgets, and timelines in accordance with changing political and security conditions. This helped to protect continuity and safety in volatile environments.
- Relational accountability, built through regular contact, mentorship, and shared responsibility, created conditions in which participating grassroots organisations could raise difficult questions about governance and grant management openly. This might not have been possible with written reporting alone.
- Trust-based funders working in fragile contexts should agree in advance on graduated and fair responses to suspected misconduct, attentive to the wider harm that abrupt or punitive funding decisions can cause to staff and communities.
