Despite the presence of global commitments to GBV localization, including the 2016 WHS, the Grand Bargain, and the Call to Action on Protection From GBV in Emergencies2, there is little evidence to suggest that the protection of women and girls is being adequately prioritized or that women and WLOs are meaningfully integrated as change agents in response initiatives (Latimir & Mollett, 2018). The Global Protection Custer (GPC) remains significantly underfunded, with the GBV Sub-Cluster particularly underfunded when compared to other cluster areas (Fletcher-Wood and Mutandwa, 2018).

Global humanitarian funding data reported to the Financial Tracking System (FTS) between 2016 and 2018 found that GBV accounted for just 0.12% of all humanitarian funding, which represented only one-third of all GBV funding requests
(IRC, 2019). Localized funding across all humanitarian response remains strikingly low, with local agencies receiving just
0.4% of all humanitarian assistance funding in 2015 and 0.3% in 2016 (IRC, 2017). Currently, financial tracking mechanisms neither provide a means to report how much funding is targeted to women and girls nor how much funding is received by WLOs (Fletcher-Wood & Mutandwa, 2019).