Nalini Singh

Nalini Singh, from Fiji, is a feminist and a social development specialist with over 20 years of experience in the design, implementation, management, monitoring, and evaluation of women’s rights and development programmes in Asia and the Pacific region.  

Prior to joining the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) as Executive Director, Nalini served as Programme Manager, Advocacy and Capacity Building for Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for seven years, and was a Programme Officer at Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) in Chaing Mai, Thailand for five years. Nalini was also a Regional Council (ReC) member of APWLD. Diverse and unique experiences across the region have provided Nalini with invaluable skills, practical knowledge, learning, and understanding of contextual realities for the work that she does.

APWLD interviewed Nalini in February 2021 and below is her story.

Becoming a feminist and growing together with APWLD

My interaction with feminists and women’s rights activists in Fiji began when I joined the Regional Rights Resource Team (RRRT). It is an organisation co-founded by Imrana Jalal, a very renowned feminist in Fiji and the Pacific, among the likes of Gina Houng Lee, Lindsey Frances, and Afu Billy. My interaction with them, and many others, opened my eyes to looking at gender justice and human rights issues and I became aware of the importance and role played by feminists in shaping our laws, policies, and programmes at the state level. 

After working for RRRT for a couple of years, I got the opportunity to join APWLD—a life-defining moment. The APWLD experience enabled me to better understand the inequalities, discrimination and injustice faced by women and girls across the world, in Asia and the Pacific, and in my home country.

APWLD helped me understand how patriarchy, culture, religion, and similar structures impact women’s lives, how oppression is created, and what the feminist movement is doing across this region. I knew then that this was the work I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and that is how it has been so far.

I left APWLD before Kate Lappin joined as the Regional Coordinator. I participated in the initial discussion to evaluate the mechanisms between the women’s human rights working group and the various Task Forces involved with the programmes, and to consider new methods of involving a broader range of APWLD members. The Programme Organising Committee was developed as a mechanism to allow more members of APWLD to participate in the programmes and activities of APWLD.

Involvement with APWLD governance 

The General Assembly elected me as a ReC member from the Pacific in 2014. It is an honour and privilege to be one of the very few former secretariat staff members to serve on the Regional Council. I am the representative of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, which is a long-standing organisational member of APWLD. I continue to be involved with APWLD, maximising the experience I have from working on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and being part of the working groups that embarked on the year-long process that the UN set up to design the SDGs.

The Fiji Women’s Forum received small grants to monitor the implementation of SDGs, and as part of the convening members of The Forum, we were involved in that project. With this, I was elected to be the focal person for the Feminist Development Justice (FDJ) Programme Organising Committee (POC) as well.

With other ReC members and part of the Secretariat, we have made lifelong friendships and invaluable relationships. I cannot count what APWLD has given me in terms of the network of friends that I have across this region. We share so much when we are together, learning about so many substantive issues and even from our personal stories.

For FDJ, programme partners are always sharing what they learned, the challenges in their contexts, and the strategies they were using to address them. As the focal person, it is my responsibility to ensure that I impart all my experience as best as I can to all the other programme partners. 

Meanwhile, the political context presents a challenge in the form of the ripple effect across Asia and the Pacific in terms of increased militarisation, fundamentalism, and rollbacks on key commitments. We witnessed the effect of COVID-19, which has had a significant impact on the way we work, alongside the inherent strength of APWLD and its membership, effectively implementing pandemic response by diversifying strategies and using online methodologies.

The organisation has not stopped working on improving commitment and engagement, which is strategic to the role the ReC played. To keep things moving, it has provided action-oriented, solution-oriented suggestions, contributing to the strategies that the Secretariat developed. I know from FDJ that the Secretariat, working with the POC, has employed various methodologies to ensure that the programme keeps going. Since time differences make joining meetings challenging, we usually provide input via email or documents. Nevertheless, we were able to work through many issues at the last Regional Council meeting through consensus.

Building the feminist movement in Fiji and the Pacific 

Naturally, it was individual women who came together. Feminist lawyers, doctors, and other feminists like Imrana Jalal, Shamima Ali, and Mary Pulear. During discussions in their homes, they agreed that women needed not only the government to address the problems they faced, but feminist organisations needed to organise and develop responses to these problems. This led to the formation of the two foremost feminist organisations in Fiji: Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre and Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM).

Thirty-seven years ago, the Crisis Centre was set up as a response to violence against women. And then, right after that, we needed to have another organisation looking at legislation and policy. We needed someone else to do the research and analysis. FWRM was born at that point. FWRM and Crisis Centre are each celebrating their 37th and 35th birthdays this year. The Young Christian Women’s Association and other faith-based groups already existed, but strong activism came through with these two organisations. 

This has created pathways for women across the Pacific. We can organise ourselves and begin such organisations. We saw it happen.

Women’s organisations were formed across the Pacific, and some came together under umbrella bodies like the National Council for Women. We experienced various political upheavals and many other difficulties, including the fact that the Pacific gets very little funding when it comes to women’s rights work, but those who managed to survive have carried on. Our steadfastness extends not only to issues related to women’s rights and human rights, but also to democracy and other issues. I believe that has led us to be as strong as we are today.

Ways moving forward

APWLD has done very well and needs to maintain the quality of programmes—their size, depth, and breadth as well as the connection to human rights accountability mechanisms. 

The main role of APWLD was to provide direct input to the UN Special Rapporteur’s annual reports on violence against women. Over time, that has grown to include multiple Special Rapporteurs and procedures. Providing members and partners a direct interface with these various mechanisms is a very useful way of ensuring APWLD’s success. This should continue and be strengthened. Bringing experts from the membership into global and regional processes is also very useful.

But we must not overload ourselves because members’ aspirations are vast. In what ways should we prioritise and ensure we are fulfilling our commitments? It is something that we must continue to evaluate frequently.