The QAQA Grassroots Young Feminist Network emerged from DIVA’s Women Defend Commons (WDC) network since 2016 in urban, rural, and maritime Fiji. DIVA for Equality is a well-known local civil society organisation that has strong and deep roots all over Fiji in women’s organising at local, grassroots levels.

In 2019, many younger women and gender-diverse activists from around the country attended a gender, climate change, and ecological justice meeting organised in Vunisea, Kadavu, an overnight inter-island boat trip from the capital, Suva. The 70+ women leaders from across the country identified various gaps and obstacles experienced by young women organising for human rights and justice at local levels.

Young feminists organised at the meeting and talked on the beaches long into the night. They came up with a new network. Then COVID-19 came, with national lockdowns and rising poverty, and only in 2021 did they really move forward with plans. In 2025, the QAQA GRASSROOTS Young Feminist Network meets regularly online and offline in 12 communities. They work on small projects and bring together young feminist women and gender-diverse feminists from many backgrounds and identities around Fiji. The network shares lives, ideas, and resources, building knowledge and skills to foster more loving, fierce, and inclusive feminist social movements that aim to create a safe and just world. Now groups are active and located along the Western side, Eastern side, Central, and Maritime in Qamea, Vatusomosomo, Kadavu, Vanua Levu, and more. Groups are growing steadily over time, as young women hear about the joy of organising in youth-led spaces and processes. See contact information below.

Young women members also join wider DIVA for Equality convened network meetings, Conferences, advocacy events, rallies, and activities. Many young women are building long-term friendships with DIVA staff, hub members, and older women working on social, economic, ecological, and climate justice. Many in the DIVA network state that they wish they had had the same kind of network for solidarity when they were younger.

The Qaqa network believes that young women from urban informal settlements, rural villages and maritime areas must be able to come as who they are, into ANY organising spaces. They want to be from their real identities, including age, disability, SOGIESC, economic class, etc. They want to be proud of who they are and work on painful issues as well as for joy and pleasure. They don’t want to feel like outsiders because of having no money, being gay or straight, facing family violence, being a single mother, or no solid educational background.

Qaqa members are smart, hard workers and insist on being taken seriously. Young women just want to build the best lives possible for themselves, their communities, and the country, not to be used for speaking and thinking, and then forgotten when plans roll out. ‘Nothing about us without us,’ they also say, with other activists. In the online and offline meetings, Qaqa members think and work through tactics and strategies to break old systems and build new, nonviolent, and gender-just ones. They think about unequal relationships where men control women, they look for ways to build self-esteem and to make better relationships in homes, workplaces, collectives, institutions, and government.

They refuse to be pushed down and want to build good education, lives, decent work, and intimate partnerships where violence is not present in the Pacific, where we have twice the global rates of violence against women and girls. Qaqa feminists work on problems over time and with each other for safety and well-being. Just as a system-wide approach is now being used in the Fiji National Action Plan to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls, so too do we need national attention to young women and SRHR, young women, poverty eradication and economic justice, to address climate-induced loss and damage, and to end development injustice. In all these areas, a much deeper and more feminist and human rights-based local and national approach is needed so that young women can break through barriers for real change.

Working with Qaqa members, Viva Tatawaqa, DIVA ED, and a longtime youth activist herself, said, “So many single mothers are facing financial problems in accessing state services, education, housing, mental and physical healthcare, maternal health services that suit their needs, and childcare, food, and ongoing medical needs. The solutions our society offers do not even touch the depth of the problems. We can change this together if we transform our state systems. Work with young women for a starting point!” says Viva Tatawaqa, Executive Director of DIVA for Equality.

“We need more awareness on patriarchy and how it works from the day children are born, about control, pressure from family and men, and about rape. We need to build girls’ confidence and help to stop coercion, control, and violence from the early years. We need to end all violence against women, family planning, teenage pregnancy, contraception, and sexual decision-making in Fijian grassroots communities.”

One young woman adds, “So many with no jobs. A lot of early school dropouts. Many reasons, including financial issues at home and no qualifications to get a job. The cycle of poverty keeps going for us. Sometimes it is hopeless.”

The young activists of the Qaqa Grassroots Young Feminist Network learn about systems of power that coerce and control. They devise ways to respond. They find out that this is not natural and can be changed over time. One young woman says, “Patriarchy is the system we build that favours people in power. Most of the time, it favours men.” Members learn that many women in Fiji uphold patriarchy, too, help men to stay in charge, and that we need to change. We can instead build better ways where everyone thrives and builds happy, productive, free lives, including women and gender-nonbinary people, as well as men.

The organising committees meet online regularly, as all the young women are busy doing many tasks around their homes and villages and settlements. Sometimes they meet around DIVA spaces, too. They are grassroots young feminists from across the divisions of Fiji, committed to building a better future amid the current patriarchal and climate crisis. As young women, at their first national meeting, they agreed they want to fight for freedom and to have their rights over their bodies and are demanding urgent, material change for social, economic, ecological, and climate justice. They decided to work on the following areas:

  • Implement community activities to end gender-based violence and support the Fiji National Plan of Action to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls; DIVA for Equality is also on the technical working group for the National Action Plan on Economic Empowerment.
  • Create a feminist action program focused on young women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), bodily autonomy, and health services for ALL women;
  • Educate young men on feminist approaches to gender justice and building resources for young feminists at the community level;
  • Engage directly with the Fiji government and institutions to influence legislation, policies, and public processes that prioritize young women in all their diversity;
  • Organise as young women to actively collaborate with sectors like Government departments and the Parliament, Defence, Police Force, Religious groups, and iTaukei governance to address gender inequalities, state and nonstate violence, and lack of support for young women in society, and create new solutions.
  • Raise issues of climate justice, gender-based violence, disabilities, and lack of access to vocational training and employment for young women, seeking reparative justice.
  • Demand respect for Fiji’s young women, especially those marginalized by poverty, early or forced pregnancy and motherhood, and diverse gender identities and sexual orientations, and young women with disabilities.

In 2025-2026 QAQA Grassroots Young Feminist Network continues to strengthen, build social networks and work for change. If you would like to join, contact DIVA at: viva@divafiji.org and cc: admin@divafiji.org