DIVA FOR EQUALITY

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We write about our lives. We tell our stories of loss, damage, human rights violations, activism and response. We carry out Pacific feminist grassroots research and analysis. We document our work and find ways to communicate what we do at DIVA for Equality. We know that memory is resistance.

A big part of this work was DIVA for Equality groundbreaking action-based research, with work from 2015 and published in 2019

DIVA published a groundbreaking evidence-based study called ‘Unjust, Unequal, Unstoppable: Fiji LBT women and gender non-conforming people tipping the scales toward justice’. The 100+ page report is fully available to the public, online. It will become one of the key resources on a new revamped DIVA for Equality website, in June 2022.
Download the Report

Availability via written and online copies,

this research complies with core DIVA ethos, to disrupt and re-generate research by and for grassroots communities, including those with non-heteronormative and gender-expansive sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC), and to do it by/in majority South countries, including in Fiji and the Pacific.

This research effort by local communities in Fiji was accompanied by a feminist collaborator, Doctor Rebecca Spence of University of New England, Australia

Every aspect of the work was designed, led, implemented and monitored by the DIVA for Equality team of grassroots, Indigenous and local researchers in Fiji. This majority South analysis has already been used to inform human rights and social, economic, ecological and climate justice work by local communities, CSOs and NGOs, CROp agencies and Pacific governments at local, national and regional levels and even at global levels by social movements. We continue to integrate the findings into our work, and that of others in the Pacific.

This report is the first Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LBTI)

human rights and social justice research that has been developed, implemented, and analysed by LBTI community for LBTI community. It took over four years and including training of over 30 Hub members and Management Collective members, most who had not completed formal schooling, in feminist action-based primary research. This research includes the work of rural, maritime and urban poor communities, and builds skills and knowledge of the groups carrying out the research, as well as the respondents using it in their activism. It contains not just realities of our LBTQ+ lives in Fiji, but recommendations to all who live and lead here.

Outcomes

The research is already changing the scope and depth of change work for LGBTQI people in Fiji and the Pacific.

Since the launch in 2019 it has been used, quoted and results taken into government, academic and non-government analysis and initiatives, for example, it has informed the work of the Fiji Ministry for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation, Ministry for Youth and Sports SRHR TOT Booklet, Fiji National EVAW Protocol where DIVA for Equality are part of the technical working group and it has helped us to move many aspects of intersectional inclusion in the cross-government, 13 sector-wide Fiji National Action Plan to prevent Violence against Women and Girls. It has influenced an Oxfam in the Pacific project, ‘Shifting Power and Shifting Voice’ on economic justice, the Pacific Feminist Community of Practice (2021-22 with 95 representatives in 14 countries), Fiji National University compulsory Gender and SOGIESC 101 training for all staff, UNWomen Staff Training on SOGIESC, SPC GESI work on development inclusion, and the work of other LGBTQI+ and wider CSO partners in Fiji and the Pacific. It is grounding a transgender-women-led regional research report and set of national work on human rights. DIVA for Equality also convened in April 2021, with Government of New Zealand, SPC and the Fiji Disabled People’s Federation and 9 networks and groups from across the region (including French speaking networks in New Caledonia), a Pacific Women’s Triennial side-event on inclusion of women in all their diversity, SOGIESC and gender justice, using findings from the report. We are now working on shorter policy summaries arising from the report to be released in mid 2022.We use feedback loops on social media and in-person (post-COVI19) to all those who were part of this groundbreaking report.

The work continues. Evidence based activism. Memory is resistance.

We also have limited hard copies for libraries and those with poor data access. Contact public@divafiji.org