As negotiations on the EU’s next long-term budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2028–2034, enter a decisive phase, WAVE has added its voice to two major joint advocacy initiatives. Together they send one clear message to EU decision-makers: funding for women’s rights, gender equality, civil society and democracy must be protected and strengthened, not diluted or cut.
The first initiative sits closest to WAVE’s core mission and to the daily work of our members. In the letter, more than 200 women’s rights organisations have called on Members of the European Parliament to keep women’s rights and the prevention of violence against women visible in the next EU budget. Inside increasingly merged funding frameworks, dedicated support for women and girls’ risks becoming harder to see and harder to reach, precisely when demand for specialist services is rising, and opposition to women’s rights is growing. The demands are concrete: keep women’s rights visible across the EU budget cycle, guarantee access to funding for women’s specialist services, and ringfence the Daphne stream so that it remains dedicated to ending violence against women and girls. WAVE and its members stand firmly behind these demands because they defend the services survivors depend on.
The second initiative broadens the frame. Signed by 30 European networks representing more than 2,800 organisations and addressed to the Council of the EU, it opposes the proposed €300 million cut to the AgoraEU programme. It urges Member States to increase the budget instead, raising AgoraEU to €10.72 billion, still just 0.5% of the entire MFF. Within that, they call on co-legislators to protect the CERV+ strand by holding its proposed 41.9% share. The message is clear: a strong, well-resourced civil society is a cornerstone of European democracy, and it cannot be defended on a shrinking budget.
WAVE has joined these calls because our members see, every day, what this funding makes possible: it saves the lives of women and girls. The European Commission already knows it works too: its own evaluation confirms as much. CERV is simply starved of resources, with far more excellent projects turned away than funded. Cutting it now, when demand for women’s specialist services is rising, and opposition to women’s rights is hardening, would mean walking away from what already works.
For WAVE, CERV+ and the Daphne strand are what sustain the women’s shelters, helplines, rape crisis centres, women’s centres and primary prevention work on the ground. It is the difference between the EU’s commitments under the Istanbul Convention and the Violence Against Women Directive being promises on paper and being real protection for survivors. That is what is at stake in this budget.
WAVE calls on the European Parliament, the Council and all EU decision-makers to safeguard and strengthen CERV+, and to ringfence the Daphne strand within AgoraEU so that these resources are protected, not reduced, throughout the MFF negotiations.
Read the joint women’s rights letter to MEPs here.
Read the joint civil society letter to the Council here.
Disclaimer: WAVE’s support for these joint letters relates specifically to their call to protect and strengthen EU funding for preventing and combating violence against women and girls, as well as for civil society organisations . WAVE does not take a position on other issues addressed by co-signatories, and none of the positions of the co-signatories should be attributed to WAVE.
