Firelight Foundation

Firelight finds, funds, and strengthens catalytic community-based organizations (CBOs) working with their communities to address important systems for women and children in southern and eastern Africa. A critical aspect of Firelight’s work is centering and amplifying the perspectives, insights, and analysis of community stakeholders who are most affected by key issues. This grant supports research examining the intersectionality of women’s agency and choices with early childhood development realities and initiatives in Tanzania. Guided by an intersectional Global South feminist approach, and centering the perspectives, analysis, and thought leadership of community-based co-researchers, Firelight will collaborate with CBOs and research institutions to gather, make sense of, and build contextually grounded knowledge about how women’s agency and choices are affected by and affects early childhood development realities and initiatives in Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia.

Firelight Foundation is an intermediary grantmaker that provides funding, technical support, and organizational capacity building to African NGOs and community-based organizations concerned with family, youth, and children's education and development. This OE grant will support a strategy review refresh focusing specifically on Firelight Foundation's social change theory and organizational capacity building approaches and tools.

This grant would provide support to the International Education Funders Group, an affinity group for 69 foundations making grants to support basic education in the developing world. The Funders Group will help members to improve their grantmaking by providing opportunities for networking, learning, and collective action among foundations.