France Bognon, Esq. is a Program Director at ICAN with responsibility for managing the Innovative Peace Fund (IPF) – the only independent, multi-donor, global grantmaking mechanism dedicated to supporting women-led peacebuilding organizations. Under her leadership, the IPF has disbursed over $7 million across 25 countries. France has over a decade of experience in offering technical support to peacebuilding organizations, from trainings on gender responsive programming and monitoring and evaluation to tailored strategic advice on institutional sustainability. Under France’s leadership, ICAN developed five new funding mechanisms, including flexible funding and two Afghan-specific rapid response streams. France manages a team of five full-time staff members who are responsible for issuing and supporting all grantmaking under the IPF.
France leads ICAN’s advocacy efforts to shift and improve donor practices for more effective funding for women-led peace efforts. This includes fostering collaborations with other peacebuilding and feminist organizations to unite efforts and amplify key shared recommendations related to improving funding mechanisms. France co-authored Funding Women Peacebuilders: Dismantling Barriers to Peace, and accompanying operational guidance, and contributed to Fund Us Like You Want Us To Win: Feminist Solutions for More Impactful Financing for Peacebuilding. In 2022, France was invited to provide recommendations on how to improve international funding policies at the General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Financing for Peacebuilding.
Prior to joining ICAN, France was a Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Experiential Learning Program Fellow with the Outside Placement Program at the George Washington University Law School, where she also received her J.D. and LL.M. in International and Comparative law. She worked as a student attorney with both the International Human Rights and Immigration Clinics, where she assisted in the civil prosecution of an individual convicted of committing torture and war crimes against an ethnic group in West Africa and co-authored a chapter on the current state of human rights class action lawsuits in U.S. federal courts. France has also worked at the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and briefly with UNDP in Rwanda. She speaks English and French and is married with a daughter and two sons.