The AHRF makes grants in the two areas described below. These areas will be expanded and others added as the Fund raises resources to support human rights initiatives in the Arab region.
The Arab region, like the rest of the world, needs support to realize the full spectrum of human rights – civil, political, economic, social and cultural. The AHRF considers that all human rights, and indeed all countries and sectors within the Arab region, fall within its mandate. The AHRF therefore focuses its funding on the following:

• Methods: approaches or tools for realizing human rights;
• Emergent Opportunities: new and promising developments that have the potential to promote the advancement of human rights.  

Methods

Human rights organizations around the world have developed and used – with much success – a range of tools and approaches, such as advocacy work, fact-finding, monitoring and reporting, litigating, constituency building, public education, training and other activities to promote human rights and support human rights claimants. While recognizing the value of and need for all such approaches, and even others, resource constraints require the AHRF to focus on funding specific methods in its initial stages of operation.

The AHRF currently focuses on supporting projects and programmes that use and develop the following methods to accomplish human rights objectives:

• Documenting and reporting on human rights violations
• Public education to inform people about their human rights and how to exercise them
• Networking and coalition building to carry out human rights campaigns
• Litigating human rights cases before domestic, regional national and/or international courts

The AHRF supports projects that do the following:

• Provide training in relation to such methods for new groups, in new countries, and/or with regard to new human rights issues
• Apply these methods in new countries and/or with regard to new human rights issues
• Strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of methods already in use
• Develop the intraregional infrastructure of methods
• Improve the relevant informational resources and materials available for advancing work related to various methods
• Initiate new and promising applications of the various methods

When evaluating proposed projects for funding, the AHRF gives priority to those that do the following:

• Show that they have the potential for replication in other countries, in relation to human rights issues and/or constituencies across the region
• Show that they have the potential to contribute to the strategic and effective strengthening of human rights in the region as a whole
• Have the capacity to be implemented in partnership with one or many organizations within a country or the Arab region as a whole

Emergent Opportunities/Developments

The AHRF supports projects that respond to potential openings for the advancement of human rights in the region. 

Opportunities of this sort may include the relaxation of government restrictions in a particular country; increased public engagement and demands for respect for a particular human right; the formation of a new network of organizations to tackle a particular human rights issue; as well as other developments that offer organizations a chance to move a human rights matter forward.

Through ongoing consultations with human rights practitioners and other advisors in the region, the AHRF works to identify developments in which targeted and timely funding can make a critical difference in realizing human rights objectives. It relies on human rights organizations in the region to draw the AHRF’s attention to these developments via the projects they propose for AHRF support.