Alison Davidian, UN Women’s representative for its Fiji multi-country office, has warned that progress on women’s rights is far more fragile than most people assume, in an interview published on 29 September 2026 by SWI swissinfo.ch, the international service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. Davidian, who was in Kabul when the Taliban entered the Afghan capital in 2021, spoke from her current Pacific posting for the Inside Geneva podcast, covering climate risk for island women, violence against women in the region, and the funding squeeze on UN Women, the UN’s gender equality agency.
Key facts
- Davidian now heads UN Women’s Fiji multi-country office, a post whose remit covers Fiji plus a group of neighbouring Pacific countries and territories rather than one country alone, according to UN Women’s own description of the role.
- She was previously the agency’s country representative in Afghanistan, according to SWI swissinfo.ch and an earlier Reuters dispatch from Kabul, and left the country in 2025.
- A UN Women study carried out this year, Beyond the Breaking Point, surveyed 844 women-led organisations in 52 crisis regions, SWI reports.
- That study found at least a million women and girls had lost vital humanitarian support since January 2025.
- Financial support for UN Women’s work has dropped over the past 18 months, the outlet reports, with cuts forcing the closure of safe houses and maternal health clinics.
- The Pacific Islands region has some of the highest levels of violence against women in the world, Davidian told the podcast.
- SWI reported no Fiji- or Pacific-specific funding figures, and Davidian did not break the closures down by country in the reported extracts.
What she said about the Pacific
Fiji and the other small island states covered by Davidian’s office face existential threats from rising sea levels caused by climate change, SWI swissinfo.ch reports, and she said local women and their livelihoods are at risk. She framed her office’s work as two questions: how to support climate-resilient livelihoods for women, and how to ensure women have a say in decisions about climate and disasters that affect their lives.
On violence, Davidian told the podcast the region carries some of the highest rates in the world, SWI reports. She did not cite a dataset in the reported extracts. The most widely cited national figure in Fiji comes from elsewhere: the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre survey Somebody’s Life, Everybody’s Business, first published in 2013, found that 64% of Fijian women who had ever been in an intimate relationship had experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner — roughly two in three. That research was not part of the SWI interview, it is more than a decade old, and it is not a UN Women product; we include it because it remains the benchmark most Fijian service providers and government agencies work from.
The funding squeeze
UN Women has taken painful financial cuts over the past couple of years, according to SWI swissinfo.ch, compounded by a United States strategy that downplays aid projects focused on gender. The outlet reports that Washington’s move to close USAID, the US government’s main overseas aid agency, and to restrict funding for programmes promoting gender equality or diversity has done particular damage to the agency’s work.
Davidian said the lost services include help for survivors of sexual violence, SWI reports, and the outlet lists safe houses and maternal health clinics among the closures. It does not say in which countries those closures happened. The agency’s own Beyond the Breaking Point survey of 844 women-led organisations across 52 crisis regions put the number of women and girls who had lost vital humanitarian support since January 2025 at a million or more; the study counted only the organisations it reached, so UN Women presents the figure as a minimum.
What we could not establish
This outlet has not been able to source a published Fijian budget line, or an audited NGO-funding total, for specialist services for survivors of violence in Fiji — shelters, counselling and legal aid. Neither SWI nor Davidian gave a Pacific or Fijian cost figure. We are therefore not attaching a dollar amount to the cuts in Fiji, and readers should treat any such number circulating without a named source with caution. Requests for a Pacific breakdown are the obvious next step for reporting on this story.
Analysis: why the funding line matters locally
What follows is this outlet’s analysis, not reporting from the interview. Where specialist services are delivered on external project money rather than from a national recurrent budget, the level of provision tracks donor decisions closely, and a cut taken elsewhere shows up locally as a closed door. Davidian’s own framing — she describes both service closures and “climate-resilient livelihoods” as her core concerns — points in that direction, but she did not discuss Fiji’s fiscal position, and we have no figures to test the point against. UN Women’s long-running Markets for Change programme, which the agency says works with municipal market vendors in Fiji and neighbouring Pacific countries, the majority of them women, is the kind of livelihood work she refers to; Davidian did not mention it in the reported extracts.
Working with men, faith leaders and sport
UN Women also spends considerable time working with men and boys across the Pacific Islands, SWI reports, precisely because of the region’s high rates of violence against women. Rather than apportioning blame, Davidian said, she and her colleagues work with local faith leaders and through sporting associations on projects that promote respectful relationships and challenge harmful ideas about masculinity.
Afghanistan: what she saw
Davidian trained in law in Australia and volunteered with the UN in Somalia, SWI reports; she described that posting as the point at which she became a feminist, after meeting Somali women setting up legal aid centres for survivors of sexual violence. “They had such courage, and I really wanted to be part of that,” she told the podcast.
Her next posting was Afghanistan. She said she was in Kabul when the Taliban entered the city in 2021, and that it felt both impossible and inevitable at the same time. Experienced aid agencies had warned that the US and NATO withdrawal would bring instability, SWI reports, but even they did not expect the speed of the advance. UN Women kept a presence in the country, with Davidian among those who stayed; she said the agency’s role was to support what Afghan women were already doing, including running health and protection services for their communities. Working there, she said, was “one of the greatest honours of my life.”
Five years on from the Taliban’s return, SWI reports that Afghan girls cannot attend school past the age of 12, that women cannot visit parks or gyms, that they cannot travel without a male relative, and that they are banned from nearly all employment. Davidian described it as a systematic erasure of Afghan women from public life, saying their perspectives, voices and faces are increasingly disappearing. SWI notes that some argue for formally designating the situation “gender apartheid”; the outlet does not name who, and Davidian did not use the term in the reported extracts.
What she said in 2022, from inside Kabul
In 2022, while still UN Women’s country representative there, Davidian told Reuters, in a report carried by The Fiji Times, that for many Afghan women simply walking out the front door had become “an act of defiance.” That report profiled Monesa Mubarez, 31, a former director of policy monitoring at the finance ministry left jobless under the new rules, and Gulestan Safari, 45, a former police officer then doing domestic work in Kabul. It also noted there were no women in the cabinet and that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs had been shut. Neither woman appears in the 2026 SWI interview, and this outlet has not verified their current circumstances.
Where the reports differ
The two accounts describe travel restrictions differently. The 2022 Reuters report said women were required to have a male chaperone to travel more than 78km, and that in relatively liberal urban centres such as Kabul women often travelled without one. The 2026 SWI account states that women cannot travel without a male relative, citing no decree and no distance threshold. This outlet has found no source that dates or explains a change between the two, so the discrepancy cannot be resolved from the available reporting.
The warning she wanted to leave
Davidian told the podcast that what happened in Afghanistan should serve as a warning well beyond its borders. The speed and scale of the rollback there, she said, shows how fragile gains on gender equality are, how quickly they can be removed, and how few will defend them.
Related coverage from this outlet
Davidian’s second question — who gets a say in climate and disaster decisions — is also live in Fijian coverage that is separate from this interview. Our earlier reports include villagers taking relocation stories to a pre-COP31 meeting in Nadi, a Macuata youth representative arguing villages should be climate implementers rather than onlookers, and Fiji’s entry into the UNDP BRIDGE climate pilot, starting in Kadavu. Davidian did not refer to any of them, and we are not presenting them as connected to her remarks.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who interviewed Alison Davidian, and on what programme?
The interview was conducted by Imogen Foulkes for the Inside Geneva podcast, in what SWI swissinfo.ch described as the final summer profile of the series. Foulkes reports from Geneva for SWI swissinfo.ch as well as the BBC, according to the outlet.
What did Davidian say the funding cuts have cost?
SWI swissinfo.ch reports that financial support for UN Women’s work has fallen over the past 18 months and that the cuts have forced the closure of safe houses and maternal health clinics; Davidian said the lost services include help for survivors of sexual violence. The outlet did not say where those closures occurred, and Davidian did not put a figure on the Pacific share of the cuts in the interview.
Is there a published figure for what Fiji spends on services for survivors of violence?
Not one this outlet has been able to source. SWI swissinfo.ch reported no Fiji- or Pacific-specific funding numbers, and we have not located a published Fijian budget line or an audited NGO-funding total for specialist gender-based violence services that we can stand behind. We are therefore not putting a cost figure on the cuts in Fiji. Any reasoning about how donor cuts translate into Fijian service levels is flagged as analysis in the article, not reporting.
How severe is violence against women in Fiji and the Pacific?
Davidian told the Inside Geneva podcast that the Pacific Islands region has some of the highest levels of violence against women in the world, according to SWI swissinfo.ch. Separately from that interview, the most widely cited national dataset in Fiji is the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre survey Somebody’s Life, Everybody’s Business, first published in 2013, which found that 64% of Fijian women who had ever been in an intimate relationship had experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner — roughly two in three. That figure is more than a decade old and is not a UN Women number.
Do the 2022 and 2026 reports agree on Afghanistan’s travel restrictions?
No. The 2022 Reuters report carried by The Fiji Times said women were required to have a male chaperone to travel more than 78km, and that in cities such as Kabul women often travelled without one. The 2026 SWI swissinfo.ch account states that women cannot travel without a male relative, with no distance threshold and no decree cited. This outlet has not found a source that dates or explains the change, so the gap cannot be resolved from the available reporting.
