Women's Empowerment in Fiji

Thank you for your ongoing support of our Women's Empowerment project. Your contributions are appreciated.

The main goal of the project is to support the functions of District Nurse La.  This support is essential for both productivity of the District Nurse and improving health and wellness. 

Our project provides support to increase the self-efficacy of 14 Community Health Workers (CHWs) to be productive health providers within their communities that span between Dawasamu District and Bureiwai District.

It is well-established that the CHWs are crucial to both optimizing the quality of care and addressing increased patient volume.  Our project aids human resources management and supports Community Health Workers to deliver services. We also support the District Nurse's role in continuous learning opportunities for her staff. 

The aim of community capacity-building frameworks is to achieve sustainable change for the benefit of all families and groups living in a community.

To achieve this, communities must seek ways to sustain their own capacity so that they can continue to work with families to help them address their immediate needs. In Dawasamu we are lucky to work alongside the community health workers whose role is to support the District Nurse in promoting health and wellbeing in the District of Dawasamu and Bureiwai. Health volunteers hold workshops sharing their knowledge and skills on specific topics. Upskilling the community health workers is a great way to share knowledge which then gets cascaded down to the community members in their own village.

Upskilling is such an important part of the health program. In September we worked on upskilling the community health workers on the importance of talking about and discussing breast cancer and how awareness workshops can save lives. Over a period of 3 weeks, we were able to conduct awareness workshops with 32 community health workers providing the material that they use to spread the word through their communities. Plus we were also able to conduct one on one and small group discussions and reached 281 community members across the district of Dawasamu.

This is a key example of how this project can make a difference to many women. Ongoing education and awareness raising means women have increased knowledge about health issues and in the case of the Community Health workers, they also have increased confidence to talk about issues that affect their community.

We thank you for your support.