Coalition Leadership to Advance RMNCAH-N Access and Accountability
The GFF is a country-led partnership, hosted at the World Bank, that works to advance the health and rights of women, children and adolescents. In the GFF’s 2021-2025 CSO and Youth Engagement Framework, the GFF recognized CSOs and youth-led organizations (YLOs) as vital partners in the work to ensure community voices and perspectives inform government and donor policy funding decisions, as well as to hold authorities accountable to their RMNCAH-N policy and funding commitments. However, a review of the first five years (2015-2020) of the GFF’s operations found that civil society engagement was inconsistent across GFF countries and many CSOs lacked the knowledge, resources and technical capacity to effectively engage with the GFF and the development of Investment Cases. To investigate these challenges, the GFF Investors Group established a GFF-CSO task force composed of representatives from its CSO, youth and donor constituencies.
The GFF-CSO task force conducted a review of civil society engagement with the GFF and developed the CSO and Youth Engagement Framework 2021-2025. During the review, the task force found that the quality of civil society engagement was directly tied to the presence or absence of strong CSO and youth coalitions.
The task force noted that while some CSOs and YLOs had access to internal resources or other donors’ funding to support their civil society coalitions, funding gaps limited the ability of coalitions to convene meetings, implement activities or develop monitoring and accountability tools. This contributed to weak governance structures, a lack of civil society awareness of the coalitions’ role in the GFF and ineffective representation of civil society in GFF country platforms. The GFF-CSO task force also looked at the successful work of well-organized CSO coalitions,
like the RMNCAH-N coalition in Malawi that effectively supported their government’s COVID responses by spreading information and monitoring and reporting community gaps to the Ministry of Health. These insights led the GFF to commit to investing in existing civil society platforms and providing funding and technical assistance via an NGO host, which it believed would better orient civil society platforms to the GFF and facilitate cross-learning among coalitions in GFF countries, with the goal of strengthening CSO and YLO engagement.
The GFF’s 2022-2024 investment in CSO and YLO leadership (through the GFF NGO Host at PAI) built on several years of previous investments from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMFG) in CSO and YLO engagement with the GFF at the country and global level. In fact, 51% of all CSOs and YLOs that received 2022-2024 funding were previous grantees, also funded between 2020 and 2022.
This Evidence Brief will describe how — in many cases — this sustained, multi-year funding enabled the establishment and strengthening of vibrant, effective coalitions that generated important outcomes and policy wins.
