Three months ago, a women-led organisation in rural Malawi closed after eight years of running a girls’ education programme. The organisation had reached over 3,000 girls, trained 50 educators, and built trusted partnerships with local schools. When its main funder withdrew, the organisation had only 90 days of runway. The founder reached out, not for emergency funding, but to ask a quieter, more profound question: “Who should I hand my learnings to? Who will hold what we built?” This question highlights a rarely measured loss when women-led organisations collapse.
Through the work of the Alliance for Women and Girls (AFWAG), a network of nearly 300 grassroots organisations across 23 African countries, a clear pattern emerges: women leaders are not failing, but the systems around them are. When an organisation closes, the loss extends far beyond the immediate programme. Leaders often provide informal guidance to other organisations, host peer learning sessions, and create financial or operational systems that others adopt. When they close, this knowledge, support, and stability vanish, weakening entire local ecosystems.
Grassroots women leaders hold unique knowledge built through years of adaptation and deep community engagement. Leaders in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Senegal, for example, navigate highly challenging contexts, developing strategies that survive funding shocks or influence local policy effectively. This knowledge exists in relationships, trust, and lived experience, and is often lost when organisations shut down. Peer networks, critical during crises and strategic decision-making, dissolve with closures, slowing knowledge flows and increasing isolation. Over time, this erosion threatens the connective tissue that sustains broader movements.
The development sector often contributes to this fragility by focusing on programme outputs rather than the underlying infrastructure that ensures organisational stability. Governance, leadership continuity, financial planning, and shared learning platforms are rarely prioritized. At the community level, the impact is immediate and profound. In Malawi, the organisation had built years of trust with families and girls, which was lost within 90 days. New organisations entering the area must start from scratch, and communities learn that programmes are temporary, weakening long-term trust and reliability.
To achieve lasting justice for women and girls, systems must be strengthened so that organisations and their leaders can endure beyond individual grants. Ecosystem health should be measured alongside programme outputs, including institutional knowledge retention, peer networks, and informal support structures. Funding models should support these “connective tissue” elements—peer convenings, knowledge-sharing platforms, leadership support, and infrastructure—as essential components, not overheads. Every grant should aim to reinforce organisational resilience as much as programme delivery.
AFWAG itself navigates short funding cycles while facilitating cross-border knowledge exchanges and compiling practitioner-built resources to prevent learning from disappearing. The true measure of progress will be whether systems exist that allow women leaders to carry less weight alone, preserve knowledge, maintain organisational stability, and protect communities from starting over repeatedly. Real justice begins when the question “Who will hold what we built?” no longer needs to be asked, when learning survives beyond a single grant, and when the relationships that sustain movements are recognised as essential infrastructure. Only then can progress for women and girls be truly sustained.
