Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM)
Program: The Young Feminist Rise Project
Timeframe: October 2023 – August 2024
Location: Central Division
Focus Area: Women’s Leadership and Decision Making
Project Date: February 2019 – January 2020
Grant Value: Type A – FJ $500,000
Area of Focus: The Young Feminist Rise Project (YFemRise)
About the Project
The YFemRise Program will be working simultaneously with two cohorts of diverse young women using two different models with the objective of building agency, changing relations and transforming structures in two different contexts by engaging with different stakeholders and integrating existing as well as innovative methodologies including gender equality and social inclusion.
Cohort 1: The Young Women in Leadership Programme (2019-2021) aims to adopt the Fiji Women’s Fund conceptualisation of transformative change to focus on building agency and capacities of a generation of diverse young women from different parts of Fiji for a greater level of praxis as feminists, advocates, and leaders in their own right. The ultimate goal is that by the end of the programme, young women will be able to adopt a feminist and human rights lens and individually and collectively work towards dismantling hegemonic power relations and address existing patterns of inequalities and discrimination in their families, communities, networks, workplaces and the wider local and national socio-political processes and systems. This will be accomplished by adopting a two-model system. Firstly, FWRM will decentralise and redesign the Emerging Leaders Forum Model (ELF) using the new ELF toolkit to produce tailor-made 9-month programmes with a build-in monitoring and evaluation component. The objective is to partner with local organisations to develop knowledge, skills and a programme responsive to the specific needs, issues, and context of a cohort of diverse young women.
Cohort 2: The Young Women Lead Initiative (YWL), which will run concurrently over the three years as a flexible, needs-based model for short-term investments in partnering with other organisations with expressed interests in enhancing young women in leadership and cater for knowledge, capacity and skills development based on feminist and human rights approach. The objective for partnership will be premised upon key guiding principles such as creating safe spaces for young women to dialogue, promote mentorship, intergenerational learning opportunities and inculcating awareness, dialogue and action from a feminist and human rights standpoint. The pilot testing for the YWL initiative using the GESI methodology is currently underway in partnership with Fiji National University (FNU).
About FWRM
FWRM was established in 1986 by a group of 56 women from various backgrounds. FWRM is a Suva-based multi-ethnic and multicultural non-governmental organisation committed to removing discrimination against women through institutional reform and attitudinal change. FWRM’s four major pillars of work are: democratisation, institutional, structural and policy transformation, intergenerational leadership and organisational strengthening.