A/HRC/41/3 E/CN.6/2019/7 positions), with a particular emphasis on small organizations (those with annual operating budgets of less than $200,000). This focus was based on a study revealing that overall, worldwide, a large number of women-led organizations tend to request small grants because of their absorptive capacity. 6 Analysing annual operational budgets of women’s organizations, the authors of the study found that more than 90 per cent had annual operating budgets below $200,000, which aligns with the trust fund’s definition of a small organization. 11. In total, 31 organizations in 25 countries and territories were awarded grants totalling $11 million in the twenty-first grant-making cycle. 12. A targeted focus on small organizations enabled the trust fund to increase its outreach to women-led organizations. As a result, a greater percentage of requests came from that group: 41 per cent of all applications were submitted by women ’s organizations that defined themselves as such, compared with 33 per cent in the previous application cycle. Small women-led organizations, as defined above, accounted for 81 per cent of applications, and 83 per cent of applications were submitted by organizations in which women made up more than 51 per cent of the staff. II. Building sustainability 13. An increasing body of evidence indicates that the specialized expertise of women’s rights organizations and women-led organizations is one of the leading factors in ensuring that programmes aimed at ending violence against women are effective in securing positive change. At the same time, one of the consequences of the historically low level of funding allocated to initiatives to end and prevent violence against women has been the relative underdevelopment of the administrative and governance capacities of organizations, in particular smaller organizations, working on these issues. For these reasons, prioritizing financial and operational capacity-building for small organizations has remained a key focus of the trust fund ’s advocacy efforts. 14. In 2018, in its twenty-first grant-making cycle, the trust fund continued to expand its small-grant-giving modality (grants of less than $125,000) to improve its outreach to women’s organizations: of the 31 organizations receiving grants, 28 were led by women, 18 were women’s rights organizations and 11 were small organizations. Through its advocacy efforts, it has sought to raise the profile and visibility of these organizations by increasing the number of platforms that showcase their achievements and inform a wider interested public about efficient and costeffective ways to bring about change. Training and capacity-building remained a key area of trust fund’s work both online and in face-to-face workshops. For example, the fund has implemented 10 online training modules, developed in 2017, on how to ensure accountability for grants, in accordance with the Project Cooperation Agreement, including sessions on project design, monitoring and evaluation; financial and operational management; and ethics and safety. The course is open to new trust fund grantees and their implementing partners and is offered as refresher training to all current grantees. By December 2018, the sessions had been delivered live in three languages and recorded to ensure wider participation and share knowledge. __________________ 6 4/16 Angelika Arutyunova and Cindy Clark, “Watering the Leaves, Starving the Roots: The Status of Financing for Women’s Rights Organizing and Gender Equality”, Association for Women’s Rights in Development (Toronto, Canada, 2013). 18-21716