WOMNET is an non-governmental organisation for networking and capacity building in the field of Gender and Global Governance as well as a project office funded by the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) based in Bonn, Germany.
This dual capacity means that we are an organisation with an agenda of our own and a strong foothold in the German NGO scene, but we develop and conduct many projects in cooperation with the Ministry, whose department of European and International Equal Opportunity Policies is our principal supporter.
For selected projects, we also receive funding from other German ministries such as the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and international and national NGOs such as the Protestant Development Service (EED), the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and WIDE (Women in Development Europe).
We regularly organise briefings and conferences, we contribute to reports and lobbying activities in Germany and other EU- and non-EU countries to help raise awareness and achieve inclusion of gender and civil society issues in national, European, and global governance policies. Our overall objective is to strengthen the participation of women's organisations and to ensure transparency and access for NGOs to consultations with UN, EU, and national governing bodies. Through alliances with organisations and social networks in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Southern countries, we back efforts to promote a gender perspective in politics and to lend a voice to civil society actors struggling to make themselves heard.
We also understand our mandate as a facilitating position between the international and the national levels by transporting international women's organisations’ positions into German debates and vice versa. In our German-language newsletter, we inform national partners and a general public on what’s new in the European Union and UN bodies concerning women’s rights and measures for achieving equality.
For the past three years, we have been expanding our networks to include significant umbrella organisations in Brussels such as Aprodev, Eurostep, and WWF, whose agendas and capacity in combination with WOMNET’s contacts have created a powerful alliance for lobbying common causes in an EU context.
AKTUELLES
