Urgent Action Fund promotes the leadership of women and women’s human rights defenders, through mobilization of resources that suport their initiatives.

In 1995, during the IV UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, a group of activists took the initiative to carry out interviews with other women activists to be able to detect the main obstacles that Human Rights Defenders and their organizations faces in their daily work. The answers that the women gave were very similar regardless of country or cultural background: There was a big need for rapid and effective access to funding for Defenders of Human Rights in unexpected or unforeseen situations. A few months later the Urgent Action Fund (UAF ) and the Program for Rapid Response Grants (RRG) was founded.

Since the UAF launched in the United States in 1997, one of the goals have been to be a global organization with regional offices,  in order to achive a better understanding of local contexts as well as closeness to the grassroots activists. So, in 2001, the Urgent Action Fund-Africa was established in Nairobi, Kenya, and in 2009 Urgent Action Fund for Latin America and Caribbean was launched in Bogota, Colombia.

Today the Urgent Action Fund is an international alliance of three autonomous sister funds that support Women´s Human Rights Defenders worldwide.