This report captures our effort to turn commitments on localisation and support for women’s leadership into action – a learning journey that aimed to test, adapt and innovate through trust-based, flexible funding.

The Women’s Humanitarian Leadership Fund (WHLF) was created to put this vision into practice. In its first phase in Ukraine, Oxfam and ActionAid together with twelve Women’s Rights Organizations (WROs), tested a simple but transformative idea: trust WROs to decide how humanitarian resources are best spent to support affected communities. Through flexible, core-style funding and light, transparent processes, the WHLF gave WROs the autonomy to act quickly, adapt to shifting realities, and strengthen their organisations from within.

Piloting the WHLF was made possible through funding from the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), as part of its commitment to advancing locally led and feminist approaches within the Ukraine humanitarian response. The concept for the fund builds on growing evidence from localisation research in Ukraine — including the DEC-funded Localisation Scoping Study (2023)1 and the Humanitarian Localisation Baseline (2024)2 — both of which highlighted persistent barriers to equitable partnerships, decision-making power, and direct funding for local and women-led actors. These studies underscored the need for new funding models that move beyond rhetoric to tangible redistribution of power and resources — the precise gap that the WHLF was designed to address.

The results of rolling this out in practice are clear. Even small, short-term grants generated outsized impact: increasing institutional capacity, supporting staff wellbeing, and advocacy influence. Partners described the experience as “a partnership, not control” – a rare example of equitable collaboration in a sector still predominantly shaped by control-driven, non-contextualised compliance and distorted power dynamics. The pilot initiative also revealed limits: short timelines and modest scale constrained deeper, long-term change. But the lesson is unmistakable: flexible, feminist funding works.

Now is the moment to build on it. We invite donors, non-governmental organisations (INGOs), and allies to join us in scaling and sustaining such models, so that trust, not control, becomes the standard for funding women’s leadership in crisis and beyond.

Report by Oxfam