WUNRN
Reaching Out,
Reaching Women
By Menka Goundan
On April 24th 2015,
the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) launched its report: “Reaching Out,
Reaching Women: Assessing the Impact and Effectiveness of FWRM’s Citizenship
Rights Awareness Training.” This report reflected FWRMs’ work on the European
Union funded project Enhancing the Political
Participation of Marginalised Women Voters.
The two target
groups identified for the purpose of this project were Indo-Fijian women and
young diverse women. Indo-Fijian women, or Fijian women of Indian descent, are
part of the Indo-Fijian ethnic minority that forms 37.48% of the total 837,271
of Fiji’s population (Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics 2012). Indo-Fijians
have faced long-term discrimination, particularly in the political arena. Since
the last military coup d’état in 2006, FWRM, which is a multi-ethnic,
multicultural human rights-based organisation, noticed a steady decline in the
participation of Indo-Fijian women in its workshops/campaigns/initiatives, as
well as at the national decision-making level.
Over Fiji’s history,
young women, which overlaps with Indo-Fijian women, have been similarly
marginalised. They face multiple discrimination at the intersection of race,
age, sexuality, place of origin and socio-economic status. However, with the
growing importance of young voters and the national voting age at 18 years, the
democratisation process was an opportunity for young women to become more
politically engaged and influential citizens.
At the conclusion of the
elections, FWRM developed monitoring and evaluation research that used a mixed
method approach in collecting data, conducting face-to-face interviews with 348
women, seven focus group discussions involving 44 women, and nine key informant
interviews. Respondents were chosen from three groups: Firstly, the direct
recipients of FWRM’s training; secondly, participants that attended further
training organised by the direct recipients; and finally, non-recipient,
randomly selected respondents.
This
research found that most recipients of FWRM’s training thought the training was
useful or very useful, that is 81% of direct and indirect recipients.
FWRM had produced two publications to accompany the two phases of training, and
69% of all training recipients also found these materials to be useful or very
useful. However, the materials were particularly helpful for those
receiving training indirectly, with close to 90% of those respondents finding
the publications useful or very useful.
One
of the objectives of the non-partisan FWRM media campaign and training was to
empower women to attend campaign meetings as a means of making informed voting
choices. The research showed FWRM made a significant impact here, as there was
a higher percentage of women who received FWRM training directly that also
reported attending campaign meetings, as compared to the indirect participants
and those from the random selection. The survey showed 64% of direct
participants attended campaign meetings, with only 42% attending such meetings
from among indirect participants and down to 35% from the random selection.
Thus FWRM’s training programmes were useful as a mechanism to politically
empower women.
Despite
the training, however, the majority of respondents did not vote for women. Only
27% of training recipients (both direct and indirect) voted for women, while
32% of the random respondents gave women their vote. This goes against
expectations, and indicates that there are many barriers remaining to the full
recognition of women’s leadership.
This
research focused on the training and not the media component of the project, as
the media campaign was monitored through different methodologies throughout the
two years of the project. However, this research does confirm the
findings of the initial FWRM scoping study from 2013: that radio remains a prime
medium for reaching women. This finding had been incorporated into the
design of the media campaign, that included multi-lingual radio advertisements
and talk-back radio advocacy. Overall, FWRM’s work with marginalised women
voters had a strong positive impact on these women citizens, and also raised
FWRM’s profile in their communities around the country.
The
research team made six recommendations following the analysis of all the data:
1.
Training
needs to be frequent to further enhance development of knowledge and empower
women to actively engage in political processes.
2.
The
ad-hoc cascaded approach was effective and needs to be strengthened and
institutionalized for future projects like this. This could be in the form of
building a network of trained community facilitators, who undergo comprehensive
training-of-trainers.
3.
FWRM
should intensify its media campaign. However, cost constraints and
legislative barriers remain a challenge.
4.
FWRM
trainers continue to conduct evaluations of their training, including stronger
follow-up. For example, interviews with the women, particularly indirect
participants, on the quality of the training.
5.
FWRM
and other women’s organizations, either independently or in collaboration, to
intensify efforts to promote women candidates. This could include the
distribution of women candidates’ information to the wider public to ensure
that female candidates’ profile gets more attention during the campaigning. However,
their ability to do this may be constrained by current legislation.
6.
Further
develop gender-sensitive voter and civic education messages that highlight the
capacities of women as candidates and political leaders.