A/HRC/50/25 access to independent complaints procedures, including in the courts. This often leads to a situation of pervasive impunity, where very few cases are brought to the attention of the judicial and other competent authorities. Where State actors are the perpetrators of such violations, there is a feeling of distrust vis-à-vis the State, which further impedes girls and young women from seeking justice and forces some of them to considerably limit or renounce their activism. 6. Insufficient, inadequate and inflexible funding 49. Globally, women’s organizations and programming relating to women and girls are disproportionately underfunded. 39 There has been a significant reduction in funding for women’s rights in recent years and, in situations of crisis, funding for women’s rights is among the first things to be reduced, despite the dire need for emergency protection funding for young women and girls.40 Girls and young women face additional barriers to accessing funding for their activism, such as the lack of registration of their organizations; the lack of flexible, sustained and core funding specifically targeted at them; constraints on funding unregistered girl- and youth-led groups; the impossibility of opening bank accounts to receive funds if they are under age; and their limited organizational capacity and lack of the specific skills, time and support needed to develop proposals and comply with donor requirements. Moreover, according to a survey conducted among young feminist organizations, there is a lack of alignment between funders and their priority issues. 41 The funding mechanisms available are too rigid; they do not recognize and support the intersectional approaches taken by many girls’ and young women’s movements and rather follow a “siloed” approach to human rights issues. In some cases, young feminist organizations and movements may not fall under the category of “women’s rights organizations” used by donors to allocate funding for gender equality. 42 50. As a result, some girls’ and young women’s organizations draw their resources from self-generated activities or the collection of membership fees, which becomes a barrier to participation for those who cannot afford them. In other cases, they access resources through umbrella organizations, although this mechanism may limit the autonomy of their work, given the unequal power relations between organizations, with the larger organizations in some cases imposing their agendas. Girl and young women activists thus often rely on mutual aid and non-financial resources generated between their networks. Promoting and protecting girls’ and young women’s activism E. 51. States have an obligation not only to respect activism as an exercise of the rights to participate in public life, to freedom of opinion and expression and to freedom of assembly and of association, but also to proactively remove the structural and systemic barriers that impede girls’ and young women’s activism and the full enjoyment of the human rights that entails. That translates into the obligations of States and other actors to ensure an enabling environment for girls’ and young women’s activism and create the necessary frameworks and policies to promote and guarantee their inclusion and participation in decision-making processes, particularly those that affect them directly. 1. Creating and enhancing enabling factors and environments 52. A number of factors contribute to creating a safe and enabling environment in which girls’ and young women’s activism can flourish. They include favourable socioeconomic conditions; dedicated and flexible funding; the existence of opportunities and co-creation of spaces for collaboration and networking; building solidarity with other activists, 39 40 41 42 See A/75/184. See A/HRC/40/60 and A/HRC/47/38. See FRIDA ǀ The Young Feminist Fund, “Brave, creative, resilient: the global state of young feminist organizing” (2017). See https://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/new-brief-where-money-feminist-organizing and https://plan-international.org/blog/2021/06/09/weve-had-enough-young-activists-call-for-educationfunding-and-real-partnerships/. 13