Grantees -Funding programs

AHRF makes grants in the two areas described below. These areas will be expanded and others added as the Fund raises resources to fund human rights initiatives in the region.
The Arab region, like the rest of the world, needs support to realize the full spectrum of human rights – civil, political, economic, social and cultural.  AHRF considers that all human rights, and indeed all countries and sectors within the Arab region, fall within its mandate. AHRF therefore focuses its funding on the following:

• Methods: approaches or tools for realizing human rights;
• Emergent opportunities: new and promising developments that have the potential to promote the advancement of human rights.  

Methods

Human rights organizations around the world have developed and used – with much success – a range of tools and approaches, such as advocacy, fact-finding, monitoring and reporting, litigating, constituency building, public education, training and other activities, to promote human rights and support human rights claimants. While recognizing the value of and need for all such approaches, and even others, resource constraints require the Fund to focus on funding specific methods in its initial stages of operation.

The Fund supports projects and programmes that use and develop the following methods to accomplish human rights objectives:

• Documenting and reporting on human rights violations
• Public education to inform people about their human rights and how to exercise them
• Networking and coalition building to carry out human rights campaigns
• Litigating human rights cases before domestic, regional and/or international courts

The Fund supports projects that do the following:

• Provide training in relation to such methods for new groups, in new countries, and/or with regard to new human rights
• Apply these methods in new countries and/or with regard to new human rights issues
• Strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of methods already in use
• Develop the  intraregional infrastructure of methods
• Improve the relevant informational resources and materials available for advancing work related to various methods
• Initiate new and promising applications of the various methods

When evaluating proposed projects for funding, the Fund gives priority to those that do the following:

• Show that they have the potential for replication in other countries, in relation to human rights issues, and/or constituencies across the region
• Show that they have the potential to contribute to the strategic and effective strengthening of human rights in the region as a whole
• Have the capacity to be implemented in partnership with one or many organizations in a country or within the region

Emergent opportunities/developments

The Fund supports projects that respond to potential openings for the advancement of human rights in the region. 

Opportunities of this sort may include the relaxation of government restrictions in a particular country; increased public engagement and demands for respect for a particular human right; the formation of a new network of organizations to tackle a particular human rights issue; as well as other developments that offer organizations a chance to move a human rights matter forward.

Through ongoing consultations with human rights practitioners and other advisors in the region, the Fund works to identify developments in which targeted and timely funding can make a critical difference in realizing human rights objectives. It relies on human rights organizations in the region to draw the Fund’s attention to these via the projects they propose for funding.