Numun Fund

The Numun Fund is the first dedicated fund for feminist technology in and for the Global South — germinated as an idea in June 2020 and co-created by Jac sm Kee (Malaysia), Esra'a Al Shafei of Majal, and Anasuya Sengupta of Whose Knowledge?, in partnership with Prospera and Women Win. The Fund is incubated at Women Win, which serves as its fiscal sponsor through registered non-profit entities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, and is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur with a distributed team of eight spanning Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, and South Africa. The name comes from a Sumerian word meaning "seed," chosen to honour the long history of leadership in arts, science, and technology by communities in the Global South. Its core aim is to "seed, resource, and sustain a feminist technology ecosystem" for groups led by women, non-binary, and trans people — framing digital technologies as movement infrastructure whose funding and governance should be rooted in the Global South rather than concentrated in the Global North.

Founding and structure

The Fund emerged from what the founders describe as "conversations, strategising and planning across distances" between June 2020 and the launch of grantmaking in 2022. Jac sm Kee serves as Co-founder and Executive Director — titled "Co-founder & Cartographer" in the Fund's movement-language role titles — alongside Jan Moolman as Co-Cartographer (South Africa), Karen D'Mello as Organisational Choreographer (India), Laura Aristizábal as Programmes Weaver (Colombia), Syar S. Alia as Info & Knowledge Systems Choreographer (Malaysia), and kathleen azali as Tech Lead (Indonesia). Governance runs through an Accountability Council — 2022–2024 members: Vinita Sahasranaman (India), Xeenarh Mohammed (Nigeria), Alexandra Garita (Mexico/USA), and Leila Hessini (Algeria/USA) — and a grantmaking structure comprising a Grantmaking Design Circle and a Community-led Selection Committee, placing affected communities at the centre of funding decisions.

Documented funders of the Numun Fund include Mama Cash (among the founding seeder women's funds), Ford Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust (£300,000, grant starting July 2023), and Channel Foundation (operating-support grant 2022–24 via Women Win fiscal sponsorship, renewed 2025–27). Mama Cash describes the Numun Fund as "the first dedicated fund for feminist tech based in, led by, and serving feminist movements in the Global South" and places itself among its seeding women's funds. Strategic partners at founding include Prospera (the international network of women's funds) and Women Win.

Grantmaking — Seed, Grow and Sustain

Grantmaking runs on three tiers, each positioned at a different moment in a feminist-tech group's lifecycle. Seed grants ($5,000–$10,000) support emerging activisms and exploratory ideas; Grow grants ($10,000–$50,000) support groups with two or more years of shared work; Sustain grants ($50,000–$100,000) support anchor feminist tech groups in community consolidation roles. All grants are structured as two-year, core and flexible funding — the design deliberately rejects project-only or short-term grant terms in favour of organisational sustainability.

The inaugural "Seed, Grow and Sustain" open call launched in July 2022 and drew 800+ applications from more than 200 countries, with 135 countries represented in the eligible pool; 167 groups were longlisted and 2,650 eligibility checks completed. Forty-three groups were awarded grants totalling $1.6 million USD — approximately 5% of applicants. The Fund refers to its grantees as "nodes of organisers" — groups are understood as nodes on a plant that can grow leaves, branches, or trees within their ecosystems rather than as discrete grant recipients. Geographic distribution of the 43 nodes: Central and South America 11, South/East/Southeast Asia 8, Sub-Saharan Africa 8, Eastern Europe and Central Asia 3, Caribbean 1, Pacific Islands 1, Southwest Asia and North Africa 1. Named grantees from the first cohort include Data Critica (Latin America/Caribbean — open-source analysis and AI tools for anti-patriarchal research), Pollicy (East Africa — feminist civic tech and data-policy advocacy), Channapatna Health Library (India — community-owned digital infrastructure and care knowledge archive), Kyrgyz Space Program (Central Asia — young women's aerospace engineering workshops), and Matavale Women's Association (Pacific Islands — digital skills training for women and girls). The fund's five-year target is $25 million to seed a sustainable feminist tech ecosystem, resource alternative tech development, advance philanthropic reform, and support global convenings and knowledge building.

Feminist tech focus and AI-adjacent work

The Numun Fund does not operate a named AI programme, but its portfolio sits in the field most directly adjacent to the corpus's AI-and-society coverage area. The Fund's three strategic focus areas are Feminist Tech Infrastructure Support (information technology, digital security, data activism, digitally-networked organising, and strategic communications), Feminist Resilience Building (supporting women/trans-led organisations to assess technology needs and create tools for safety and movement building), and Feminist Tech Creativity and Innovation (developing alternative feminist frameworks addressing disparities in technology access, design, and development). First-cohort grantees with the most direct AI-and-data footprint include Data Critica, which develops open-source analysis and AI tools for anti-patriarchal research, and Pollicy, which runs feminist civic tech and data-policy advocacy in East Africa.

Beyond grantmaking the Fund has run complementary convening programmes. The Feminist Tech Playground (FTP), co-organised with APC's Women's Rights Programme in 2022, engaged 90 participants across 21 play sessions exploring feminist tech infrastructures. The Feminist Open Font Project brought 55 activists and designers from 11 countries into a HurufType collective partnership to develop feminist-rooted open typefaces. In 2022 Numun organised a "Trueque" — a Mama Cash–Solidarity Fund–supported peer exchange bringing together six women's funds and feminist tech activists to discuss technology intersections with climate justice, crisis response, gender-based violence, and digital platforms.

Position in the corpus funder slice

The Numun Fund fills a structural gap the current funder slice does not contain: a dedicated re-granting vehicle rooted in the Global South whose mandate is specifically feminist technology as movement infrastructure. The existing feminist-funder entry — Mama Cash — is an Amsterdam-based international women's fund with broad feminist organising scope, not feminist-tech specifically, and Mama Cash is itself among Numun's seeding funders. No other current funder entry targets the intersection of feminist organising, technology, and the Global South as its primary mandate.

The Fund's geography adds coverage not present in any existing funder entry. The current slice includes European-anchored digital-rights pooled vehicles (European AI & Society Fund, Digital Freedom Fund), pan-African pooled instruments (African Digital Rights Fund, African Women's Development Fund), and Global South–coordinated funders (Fundación Avina, Arab Human Rights Fund), but none has feminist-tech-as-mandate as their express purpose, and none is headquartered in Southeast Asia. The Numun Fund adds a Malaysia-headquartered, South-facing, feminist-tech-specific vehicle — the corpus's first funder whose geographic centre of gravity is Southeast Asia.

The Fund's grantmaking governance model is also structurally distinct. Mama Cash is the corpus's prior example of community-led participatory grantmaking through an eleven-person Community Committee of feminist activists; the Numun Fund applies an analogous model through its Grantmaking Design Circle and Community-led Selection Committee across a transnational Global South constituency with a technology-specific mandate. The "nodes of organisers" framing — grantees as nodes in a living ecosystem rather than discrete recipients — is the corpus's first encounter with a relational grantmaking ontology of this kind.

Where the existing funder slice gives the corpus windows onto strategic-litigation infrastructure (Digital Freedom Fund), AI-safety-aligned philanthropy (Coefficient Giving), participatory feminist grantmaking (Mama Cash), and pan-African civil-society pooled vehicles (African Digital Rights Fund), the Numun Fund is the corpus's principal window onto dedicated feminist-tech infrastructure funding for the Global South — a grantmaking vehicle whose mandate is to resource the feminists building, reclaiming, and governing technology from the communities most affected by it.