Established in 2009 - In 1995, during the UN World Conference on Women, hosted in Beijing, several activists took the initiative to interview colleagues about the greatest obstacles faced by women human rights defenders and their organizations in their on-going work. The answers were similar, irrespective of the country or cultural background: there was an urgent need for rapid and effective access to funds for women human rights defenders in unexpected and unforeseen circumstances. A few months later the Urgent Action Fund, with its Program of Rapid Response Grants (RRGs), came into being. Originally founded in the United States in 1997, the UAF always retained a vision of regionalization, the objective being to gain greater understanding of local contexts and to be closer to the places where grass-roots activists worked. As a result, in 2001, the Urgent Action Fund-Africa was established in Nairobi, Kenya, and in 2009 the Urgent Action Fund of Latin America and the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in Bogota, Colombia. Today the organization is an international alliance of three autonomous funds that support women human rights defenders throughout the world.