Power Up Partners - femLINKpacific, PINA and Women in Media during a networking session
The POWER UP Project, supported by the Asia Foundation (TAF) is a collaboration of three organizations, namely WIM (Women in Media) Fiji, PINA (Pacific Islands News Association) and femLINKpacific (femLINK).The collaboration is to support the three organizations to strengthen women’s coalition to address Gender Based Violence and Safeguard Freedom of Expression.
The project which will run for two years started on the 5th of February 2024 and will end on June 30th 2025.
The project has been a positive collaboration, in that as a feminist media organization, femLINKpacific has been able to share its expertise and knowledge with the other two media organizations which in turn have shared their networks, experiences and knowledge to benefit the work of femLINKpacific.
The three organizations have held collaborative activities and these have either been trainings, celebration of special days or for special events like the PINA summit.
Activities with Women In Media (WIM) FIJI
FemLINK has been invited to various activities by WIM Fiji and two of which were the celebrations for International Women’s Day and World Media Freedom Day. The Executive Director of FemLINKpacific was invited to be part of a panel discussion in Lami and spoke on the topic of Empowering Women in The Digital Era and Combatting Gender Based Violence whilst discussing the correlation between Conventions, and the Elimination of Gender Based Violence. FemLINK was also invited on World Media Freedom Day, with other media agencies, to listen to a panel discussion featuring the Attorney General and other notable media personalities, to discuss the Challenges faced by the Media Industry.
FemLINK has also been part of various trainings and recently conducted two trainings for various media houses one on the PPSEAH (Prevention of Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harrassment) and the other on making connections on gender, international conventions and work policies and ethics. The two organizations constantly meet to see how they can help each other and WIM Fiji will be conducting media trainings to expose the Fiji media landscape to the FemLINK networks soon.
Power Up Partners - WIM Fiji, Asia Foundation, FemLINKpacific and PINA during the World Press Freedom Day 2024 event
Activities with Pacific Islands News Association (PINA)
The engagement with the Pacific Islands News Association has been to empower the women in media in various countries in the Pacific. WIM Fiji is a partner but through PINA, femLINKpacific has been able to work with other media agencies and have conducted trainings for Women in media representatives from Papua New Guinea, Solomons, Vanuatu, Kiribati and even had a representative from WIM Australia in one of their training sessions. There have been trainings conducted in Vanuatu and this is all in the hope of empowering women in media to know their gender roles and how to protect themselves by understanding and utilizing local and international legal instruments to help them in combatting gender based violence. The workshops have enabled women in media to realise the importance of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women) and more importantly appreciate the role of femLINKpacific and other women human rights organizations in advocating issues about women.
In the trainings the women have been able to coordinate and form their women in media organizations and also during the PINA summit women journalists were able to push for more women in the executive board, which they achieved by having 50 percent of women in leadership.
Collaboration
The collaboration between the three organizations have been beneficial to all and the learning and empowerment that have been a result of the collaboration has not only been felt immediately, but it is hoped that this learnings will also be shared to the male counterparts in the various media organizations in Fiji and in the Pacific.
We thank The Asia Foundation for this very unique and inspiring project and we hope that it can be extended to reach all media organizations and islands in the Pacific.
