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Our first case study, published in January 2006, looks at the work of Urgent Action Fund–Africa. In 2004 a team from the Center for the Protection of Underprivileged Women in Cameroon paid a visit to Kondengui maximum-security prison in Yaoundé, the nation’s capital. Brought in to provide skills training to female inmates, its members were troubled by the conditions they found — including a rash of politically motivated arrests, lengthy pretrial detentions, severe overcrowding, and minimal health care.
 The team saw a pressing need to investigate and document cases of abuse and unjustified detention of women at the prison. But time was short: the center had only been granted access to the facility for five months, and its clearance could be revoked at any moment.
Luckily, peers put the center’s staff in touch with Urgent Action Fund–Africa, which makes small but timely grants to safeguard women’s human rights throughout the continent. Since its inception in 2001, the fund, which is based in Nairobi, has made dozens of swift, smart grants to help women’s rights groups seize vital opportunities or avert imminent risks. Although no more than US$5,000, some of these grants have saved the lives of female activists in Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Zimbabwe; others have helped set important legal precedents in Cameroon, Kenya, and Uganda and secure women’s participation in peace negotiations in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. Less than three days after receiving a proposal from the women’s group in Cameroon, the fund approved a grant of US$4,200 — enabling the center’s staff to quietly collect data on conditions at Kondengui, provide legal assistance to women inmates, and mount a media campaign to publicize its findings. As a direct result of this work, the prison released 304 female inmates who had been illegally detained or faced overdue trials. What’s more, it began to separate male and female inmates and established an ombudsman’s office to handle complaints from inmates. “We fund opportunities — not programs,” says Kaari Betty Murungi, a celebrated human rights lawyer who directs the fund. “The idea is to enable an organization to take advantage of an opportunity that would otherwise be lost.” Read more about Urgent Action Fund–Africa in Seizing the Moment to Advance Women’s Rights (pdf). Download a free copy of Adobe Reader:
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