Review finds the Fiji Women’s Fund is a credible vehicle to facilitate support towards the women’s movement

A Mid Term Review (MTR) commissioned by the Fiji Women’s Fund has confirmed the continued relevance of the Fund’s overall strategic intent and purpose.

The MTR was designed to assess progress towards key outcomes and to provide guidance and recommendations. The review was both summative and formative in that it assessed both achievements and shortfalls to date and looked forward to how the Fund should best be shaped in the future.

Key findings include that the Fund :

• had established its place as a credible vehicle to facilitate support towards women’s movements and had effectively built relationships with global women’s funds to strengthen ownership, identity and legitimacy,
• had built its legitimacy with global and local women’s movements,
• helped empower women’s organisations through funding, capacity building, mentoring and facilitating networking,
• increased the influence of individual women and organisations within their communities with several identified examples of women’s groups, organisations and networks gaining significant influence in their communities and at the national, regional and global level,
• established a flexible, adaptive and collaborative approach to working with partners rather than a hierarchical relationship which was greatly valued,
• was able to balance the requirements of being an Australian Government funded initiative while also maintaining flexibility to advocate and support a range of projects and interventions relevant to women’s organisations,
• had taken steps to progress towards becoming an independent entity by preparing a localisation strategy and hand over plan.

The report also highlighted 13 key recommendations for the sustainability and financial security of the Fund ranging from suggestions on making changes to the eligibility criteria and categorisation of grants, revision and improvements to the Capacity Development and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning processes and the development of a detailed strategy for the Fund’s transition to an independent Fund.

The Fund and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has accepted the recommendations and have already implemented a number of the suggestions. The Fund is currently working on a revised grants eligibility and categorisation process which will be implemented in its fourth call of funding later in 2020.  The Fund has also chosen to move up the process of localisation, details of that process can be read in this blog.

To read the full report, please click here.