Enhancing learning and coalition building is at the heart of the mandate of the United Nations Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) to serve as a global hub of knowledge for local women peacebuilders, humanitarians, and human rights defenders around the world. The WPHF Secretariat launched its Global Community of Practice in 2020 to connect WPHF civil society partners, strengthen their networks, and reinforce their capacities.
Enabling the expansion of its capacity strengthening and knowledge sharing efforts, the WPHF Secretariat established the Global Learning Hub (L-HUB) in 2021. The L-HUB offers training, exchange, and mentoring opportunities tailored to the needs and interests of WPHF-supported civil society partners and women human rights defenders through conducting regular consultations and annual CSO surveys.
WPHF Global Learning Hub
WPHF L-HUB initiatives include:
- Capacity strengthening webinars tailored to the needs of CSOs – made available in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish – covering critical institutional development and technical skills relating to women, peacebuilding and humanitarian response. The topics of the webinars are selected based on the demands of the CSOs collected through post-webinar feedback forms throughout the year and the Annual CSO Survey on the L-HUB initiatives, conducted every year in January. These capacity strengthening webinars are complemented by training guides and tip sheets that build on and expand the content of the webinars, making the information more accessible to all.
- Series of peer exchange sessions, which provide an engaging space for CSO members to share strategies and challenges on Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action (WPS-HA) topics, and knowledge cafés, where CSO members present original knowledge products resulting from their work. Peer exchange briefs are produced and made available in several languages to summarize the information shared during the peer exchange and knowledge café sessions.
- Global in-person convenings fostering connections and joint advocacy among WPHF-supported CSO partners and women human rights defenders. These will be organized every two/three years contingent on available funding. In May 2023, WPHF – in collaboration with the German Federal Foreign Office (GFFO) – convened the Global Women’s Forum for Peace and Humanitarian Action (GWF) in Berlin with 200 international and government stakeholders, including 87 women’s rights organizations across 29 countries. The Forum provided women leaders with a unique opportunity to build relationships and sisterhood, showcase their impact, and liaise with high-level decision makers, UN entities, and INGOs. It culminated with the adoption of the Berlin Declaration, which captured the priorities calls to action of the CSOs to influence future key policy processes. Following this, the L-HUB launched a Call for Proposals for those organizations that participated in the Forum to identify advocacy actions pushing forward the recommendations of the Berlin Declaration. As a result, four CSOs have received a grant to implement two joint advocacy actions aimed at accelerating women’s participation in peace and humanitarian response. Both initiatives will be implemented in 2024.
- The CSO Peer Learning Awards, launched in collaboration with Women Have Wings, to promote the work and recognize the efforts of 10 women CSO leaders engaged in peace and crisis response — supporting mutual capacity building, collaboration and networking opportunities between tandems of CSOs.
- The WPHF Mentorship Scheme, launched in 2021 to provide capacity strengthening opportunities to WPHF civil society partners through mobilizing the expertise of Germany’s Action Network on Forced Displacement, and to foster peer learning and long-term relationships between tandems of CSOs focusing on women in displacement.
L-HUB Tools and Channels
The L-HUB is managed by the WPHF Secretariat and provides WPHF civil society partners with:
- A digital library, which includes a wide range of resources for WPHF CSO partners, including a repository of WPHF-authored training resources for women’s CSOs, knowledge products produced by WPHF CSO partners, and other useful materials on peacebuilding and humanitarian response.
- An email distribution List to share capacity strengthening resources and knowledge exchange opportunities.
- An exclusive Facebook group that enables CSO partners to highlight their impact, exchange lessons learned, share news and information on funding and training activities, and give updates on L-HUB events and initiatives.
For more information on the L-HUB, please click here.
Explore previous CSO surveys on the WPHF Global Learning Hub:
