A/HRC/44/3 E/CN.6/2020/8 8. As of December 2019, the following parties had contributed to the trust fund and its annual grant-giving: the Governments of Austria, Canada, Hungary, Ireland, Isreal, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America, as had the Spotlight Initiative, the joint effort of the European Union and the United Nations to eliminate violence against women and girls. Support was also received from the UN-Women national committees of Austria, Germany, Iceland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States, as well as from UN-Women Goodwill Ambassador Nicole Kidman, and various organizations including Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary and the United Nations Women for Peace Association, as well as from private sector partners in particular M ahendi Projects, Soko and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund . 9. The total funding requested in response to the trust fund ’s twenty-second call for proposals was more than $434 million from 1,086 organizations. In total, 24 organizations in 21 countries and territories were awarded grants totalling $9.2 million. In its call for proposals, the trust fund focused primarily on women ’s rights organizations and organizations led by women (defined as organizations in which women hold at least 51 per cent of the leadership positions). Twenty-two of the 24 grants were awarded to organizations led by women. In the light of findings that many organizations led by women around the world tend to request small grants because of their absorptive capacity, 7 the trust fund has put particular emphasis on small organizations (defined as organizations with annual operating budgets under $200,000). The proportion of small organizations applying for grants in the twenty second cycle overtook that of large organizations (52 per ce nt, up from 43.2 per cent in the twenty-first cycle). In addition, the trust fund announced that grants totalling $10.1 million had been awarded to 20 organizations in 18 countries and territories for its twenty-third cycle of grants. The grantees came fro m the same pool of applicants as the awardees of the twenty-second cycle. 10. In July, the trust fund also launched a call for proposals in Latin America and Africa as part of the Spotlight Initiative of the European Union and United Nations. The call was focused on those working on behalf of groups facing intersecting forms of discrimination, in alignment with the 2030 Agenda and the principle of leaving no one behind in programming on ending violence against women and girls. The trust fund has partnered with the Spotlight Initiative to complement the outreach and resourcing activities of the Spotlight Initiative in support of civil society organizations, in particular small, local women’s rights organizations in countries targeted under the Spotlight Initiative in the context of outcome 6 of the Initiative ’s theory of change. The trust fund has announced the award of 21 country-level projects in Africa for a total of $7.7 million and three multi-country projects for $2.7 million. In Latin America, a total of $5.5 million was endorsed by its regional programme advisory committee. 11. In 2019, the trust fund’s twenty-second cycle of funding included four new projects in Bangladesh, Kenya and Mexico on preventing and ending violence against women and girls in the context of the forced displacement and refugee crisis. The trust fund opened a special funding window for that work in 2017 in recognition of the high risk of gender-based violence experienced in displaced communities. __________________ 7 4/15 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). In that report, the autho rs analyse the annual operational budgets of women’s organizations and find that more than 90 per cent have annual operating budgets below $200,000. This aligns with the trust fund’s definition of a small organization. 19-21597