785 foundations in 43 countries made 23,000 grants totaling $2.8 Billion in 2016
The Advancing Human Rights initiative is a research project to document the landscape of foundation funding for human rights and track changes in its scale and priorities. It uses grants data to map the human rights issues addressed, funding strategies used, and populations and regions served. For those considering human rights-related grantmaking for the first time, this website offers an introduction to the field.
With limited resources and immense challenges, now more than ever human rights grantmakers and advocates are asking critical questions about the human rights funding landscape: Where is the money going? What are the gaps? Who is doing what? The Advancing Human Rights initiative is a collaboration between Human Rights Funders Network and Candid, in partnership with Ariadne and Prospera, to track the evolving state of global human rights grantmaking by collecting and analyzing grants data. The goal is to help human rights funders and advocates make more informed decisions, discover opportunities for collaboration, and work more effectively.
It is a very well structured and easily accessible document. Remarkable is that human rights defedners as a category receive only 1% of all grant money while – perhaps predictably – youth and women together score some 46%. However, it is likely that human rights defenders are the recipients of many of the grants but that these are categorised differently.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 