FIJI has committed $F116million across 35 gender programs since 2020, but when it comes to where that money went, who it reached and how it impacted their lives for the better, we lack a transparent system that provides honest, clear answers.
These are figures that come from Fiji’s own Beijing+30 country progress report which was submitted to UN Women in 2024. The report records the spending. It also acknowledges that gender-responsive budgeting is still being rolled out across government.
The spending is part of a much larger body of commitment. Fiji has signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
It has a Constitution that guarantees equal rights. It has a National Action Plan to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls, a Women’s Economic Empowerment National Action Plan, and a five-year Cabinet response to the CEDAW committee’s 2025 findings.
Each of these came with commitments. The question that underlies all of them is: are they working? It is also a question that our current data systems don’t fully answer.
Part of that answer requires data that does not exist, yet. According to UN Women’s data hub, as of December 2020, only 28.7 per cent of the indicators needed to monitor Fiji’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) gender commitments had data available.
Data on women’s access to land, physical and sexual harassment in the workplace, gender and poverty, and women’s access to technology skills are among those unavailable. These sit at the centre of what every women’s rights plan in Fiji is written to address.
The gaps extend beyond what is being counted to what is being tracked over time. Women and girls aged 15 and over in Fiji spend 13.9 per cent of their time on unpaid care and domestic work. Men spend 4.9 per cent.
Whether that gap is closing is not known. The data to track it over time is not being collected consistently.
The monitoring systems attached to Fiji’s own plans tell a similar story. The National Action Plan on violence against women and girls, launched in June 2023 with a $F6million commitment from the Australian Government, included provision for a monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) framework.
As of 2024, that framework was still being developed. The Gender-Responsive Planning and Budgeting (GRPB) Guidance Manual, the tool designed to standardise how ministries report gender spending, was launched in 2024. The Beijing+30 report acknowledges it is still being rolled out.
What those gaps mean in practice is visible in the violence numbers. In her ministerial statement to parliament on October 1, 2025, Minister for Women, Children and Social Protection Sashi Kiran reported that nine women had died from intimate partner violence in Fiji in the first nine months of that year alone. “These are not just statistics, these are lives.
Mothers, daughters, sisters, gone because of violence that could have been prevented,” she said.
The Minister also told parliament around 60 per cent of Fijian women have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime, and that gender-based violence costs Fiji an estimated $300million annually.
The Domestic Violence Decree has been law since 2009 while the National Action Plan was launched in 2023. What current data cannot show is whether violence against women in Fiji is decreasing or whether the laws and plans in place are having any effect.
Where data has been tracked consistently, results are visible. In 2014, 52 per cent of Fijian women had access to and used formal financial services, against 64 per cent of all Fijians.
The Beijing+30 report notes overall access had grown by 2020 but does not provide a current figure for women specifically. Where the gap stands in 2025 is not recorded.
Fiji ranks last among 18 economies in the Eastern Asia and Pacific region on gender equality, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report. It is the only economy in that group that has not closed even 60 per cent of its economic gender gap, sitting at 58.8 per cent.
The World Bank’s 2025 Pacific Economic Update answers at least one question: closing Fiji’s gender employment gap could lift gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by 30 per cent. But for the few questions answered, many others remain open.
As we observe another season of International Women’s Day or month, the data raises a question we have yet to answer: if the cost of inaction is known and the benefit of closing the gap is clear, where is the weak link and why?
