Page 29 - Fiji Traveller Issue 1

Kitchen table politics

Supporting the world’s human rights activists from Suva

By Samantha Magick “In the Asia Pacific region, we have some of the highest
numbers of deaths and disappearances of human rights
At the height of Fiji’s Covid-19 wave last year, one Fijian woman defenders,” says Buadromo. “So the need for this sort of fund
was working from her kitchen table in Suva to help arrange the was very clear right from the beginning.
evacuation of women activists from Afghanistan. Buadromo describes herself as the main resource mobiliser,
Virisila Buadromo is the co-lead at Urgent Action Fund Asia working with a team spread across Asia and the Pacific, to
and Pacific, a feminist grantmaking organisation that provides mobilise funds and support.
emergency funding to women and non-binary human rights However her role changed in August 2021, as the situation in
defenders in the first ten days of any kind of crisis. Afghanistan erupted.
UAF Asia and Pacific is part of a sisterhood of funds (in the The likelihood of the need to respond in Afghanistan was first
U.S., Africa and Latin America), and the most recent to be flagged in 2020, when advisors based in that country started to
established. warn of the likely implications of the U.S. pullout.

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