From Kabul to Fiji: UN Women’s Alison Davidian on the fight for women’s rights

Alison Davidian was in Kabul when the Taliban entered the city in 2021. Now she leads UN Women's office in Fiji, where climate change and deep cuts to US aid threaten the women she works with.

In the final summer profile of our Inside Geneva podcast, she explains why she believes women’s rights everywhere are more fragile than we think.

What takes a woman from a career in law in Australia to Somalia, Afghanistan, and then…Fiji?

That’s what we find out in this week’s episode of our Inside Geneva podcast, when, in our final summer profile, we talk to Alison Davidian of UN Women. Like many UN agencies, UN Women has suffered painful financial cuts in the last couple of years, and these have been compounded by a US strategy which downplays aid projects focusing on gender.

Davidian is the child of immigrants; her father arrived in Australia from Armenia, by way of Lebanon. Her mother came from Greece. Her father, Davidian remembers, never talked about the Armenian genocide in which he lost members of his family, but his daughter always sensed it as “an open wound that has been carried through generations.”

Growing up, Davidian was always conscious of her migration inheritance and the opportunities she had growing up in Australia. While she trained in law, she always knew she wanted to see the world, and she volunteered to work with the UN in Somalia. That, she tells Inside Geneva, was how she became a feminist.

“I just met some of the most incredible Somali women,” she remembers. “And they were really fighting to set up legal aid centres that would support women who experienced sexual violence. They had such courage, and I really wanted to be part of that.”

Afghanistan and the Taliban

Courage was needed in her next posting in Afghanistan. Davidian was there, working for UN Women, in 2021 when the Taliban regained power. Although experienced aid agencies had warned that the US/NATO pull-out would inevitably lead to instability, even they did not expect the speed of the Taliban’s advance.

“I was there in Kabul when they entered the gates of Kabul,” Davidian tells me. “And even when it was happening, it felt like it happened so quickly, and it was so impossible and inevitable at the same time.”

UN Women, while some of its international staff did leave, decided to keep a presence in Afghanistan, and that presence included Davidian. But what could she and her colleagues realistically do, in the face of the growing repression of women? Davidian does not deny UN Women faced a huge challenge, but still believes the agency could offer support.

“Afghan women are finding ways to continue delivering health and protection services for the communities they’re still running,” she explained. “And really our role was to support, in any way we could, what Afghan women were already doing.”

But five years have now passed since the Taliban’s return, and the restrictions are suffocating. Afghan girls cannot attend school past the age of 12, women cannot visit parks or gyms and they cannot travel without being accompanied by a male relative. They are also banned from nearly all employment. Some say the oppression should be officially designated “gender apartheid” (and we will have more about that in the next episode of Inside Geneva.) Davidian sees it as a systematic erasure of Afghan women from public life.

“The perspectives, the voices and the faces of Afghan women are increasingly disappearing.”

Women and climate change

Davidian left Afghanistan in 2025, with regret, but still convinced that working there was “one of the greatest honours of my life.” Now, she is UN Women’s representative in the Fiji multi-country office. It sounds like a rather nice reward – beaches, white sand, palm trees – after the stresses of Afghanistan, but Davidian’s role in the southern Pacific has its challenges too.

Fiji, and the other small island states Davidian covers, are facing existential threats from the rising sea levels caused by climate change. Davidian and her colleagues know that local women and their livelihoods are at risk.

“How do we support climate-resilient livelihoods for women? How do we make sure that women also have a say in the decisions that are affecting their lives when it comes to climate and disasters?”

UN Women also spends a lot of time working with men and boys in the Pacific Islands. Why? Because the region has some of the highest levels of violence against women. Rather than pointing the finger of blame, Davidian and her colleagues are working with local faith leaders, and in sporting associations, on projects that promote respectful relationships and challenge harmful concepts of masculinity.

But in the last 18 months, UN Women has seen financial support for its work drop. Washington’s move to close USAID, and to restrict funding to programmes which promote gender equality or diversity, has done particular damage to the kind of work the agency does.

A UN Women study carried out this year called ‘Beyond the Breaking Point’ surveyed 844 women-led organisations in 52 crisis regions, and found that at least a million women and girls had lost vital humanitarian support since January 2025.

That support, Davidian told Inside Geneva, includes help for survivors of sexual violence. Cuts have forced the closure of safe houses, and maternal health clinics.

Seeing this happen, combined with her experience in Afghanistan, makes Davidian fear we are seeing a more widespread rollback of women’s rights. “The speed and the scale of the rollback [in Afghanistan] is and should be a warning to people everywhere. Because it shows how fragile progress is on gender equality, how quickly that progress can be taken away and how few will defend it.”

Listen to the whole fascinating conversation on Inside Geneva.

Edited by Veronica De Vore/sp