Implementation of the Small Grants Program for Afghan Women's Civil Society Organizations

This is a grant that addresses an issue I discussed in my dissertation. The issue is whether or not a law has agency when inserted in a culture that has pre-existing practices already accomplishing the same ends that the law supposes to constitute -- does law make people do things?, is the real question.

The rest of this blog post is a quote from the grant:
http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&flag2006=false&oppId=43401

Now living under a Constitution that codifies equal rights for women, Afghan women have an official framework to support their personal and professional development. With the exception of constitutionally mandated quotas for women’s representation in Parliament, however, all indicators of women’s status reveal that enforcement of constitutional rights lags far behind enactment. A combination of poverty and deprivation, ill health, illiteracy, discriminatory customary laws, harmful traditional practices, and physical and emotional abuse conspire to keep women at the bottom of society. To ensure they receive sufficient attention, women’s civil society organizations (CSOs) are needed to advocate on behalf of women and help mobilize resources, deliver essential services, and implement useful development activities. However, women’s CSOs cannot effectively undertake these tasks until they acquire a wide range of new skills—from assessing needs, designing responsive interventions, and implementing programs to managing operations, finances and people, building alliances and networks, planning strategically, and monitoring and evaluating performance—in addition to building capacity in the technical sectors in which they wish to work. The three-year $26.7 million “Afghan Women’s Empowerment through a Sub-grant Umbrella Mechanism” (AWE-SUM) program is designed to strengthen the capacity of women-led/focused CSOs to contribute to the social, economic, and political development of Afghan women through the provision of financial and technical assistance to support women-specific activities in the following areas: 1. Implementing activities that improve the status, safety and well being, human and legal rights, and livelihoods of Afghan women and girls; 2. Delivering services that directly address the social, political, and economic needs of Afghan women and girls; 3. Undertaking efforts to increase the participation of Afghan women in development as implementers, change agents and beneficiaries; and 4. Creating or strengthening mechanisms and channels by which Afghan women can access information, network, and take advantage of personal and professional development opportunities. Applicants will propose approaches to implementing the following Activity Components and indicate how those approaches will help accomplish the Activity Objectives: 1. Awarding sub-grants for technical and organizational capacity building of eligible organizations, including equipment, and for the activities of such organizations; 2. Assessing organizational and technical capacity needs of eligible organizations and developing responsive interventions; 3. Overseeing sub-grant implementation to ensure that in addition to successful implementation of activities, CSO institutional strengthening and technical capacity building within recipient organizations is achieved; and 4. To support the above components, developing and implementing a comprehensive communications plan and strategy to generate widespread interest in the sub-grant program among women’s CSOs and to develop and manage an information campaign about the program to inform other stakeholders. The following link will take prospective applicants who are interested in this high visibility program to the full solicitation. Click on #1, “Download Application Instructions.” http://apply07.grants.gov/apply/UpdateOffer?id=88