This document provides details about the Australian Government’s investment in supporting adolescent girls in the Pacific. It includes information about:
This report presents lessons learned from menstrual health actors working in the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the local context of island-based nations. It is a unique case-study that captures the specific menstrual health challenges faced by countries with dispersed populations across large geographic locations with limited income and commercial access. The report explores how innovative investment can be a means of facilitating a new market opportunity, enabling improved access to necessary healthcare products, and support venture creation for women-led businesses.
Adolescent girls in the Pacific face challenges because they are girls; and they can also be discriminated against for other reasons, such as having a disability or getting pregnant. In this short video, adolescent girls from the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu talk about the issues that are important to them – such as education and climate change, the challenges they face – such as violence in their homes and cyber bullying, and the strategies they believe will work to empower adolescent girls in the region.
This checklist proposes actions in five specific areas:
- Learn from women’s experience and support their leadership.
- Develop and implement gender-sensitive responses to COVID-19.
- Support women’ economic security.
- Prioritise support to domestic violence survivors.
- Ensure continued access to health services.
This research resource document provides guidance on how to best measure women’s and girls’ empowerment in impact evaluations, based on the experiences of J-PAL affiliated researchers around the world. This research resource document offers practical tips for measuring women’s and girls’ empowerment in impact evaluations. It is designed to support the work of monitoring and evaluation practitioners, researchers, and students.
In the Pacific region, there has been some significant progress towards achieving the SRHR goals embedded in international commitments. The number of Pacific Island countries with national population policies is steadily increasing and the integration of sexual and reproductive health into primary health programs has also improved. Reducing child mortality is an area where the Pacific region is doing particularly well, with 10 of the 14 Forum island countries on track to achieving this goal.
This publication is a ‘one-stop-shop’ for international human rights conventions and other related documents. It is designed to be a reference for judges, magistrates, legal practitioners, law students human rights advocates, civil society representatives and policy makers across the Pacific.
In the Pacific region 56 per cent of the population is under the age of 25. Pacific young people have diverse needs, opportunities and experiences, living as they do across 20,000 islands around the Pacific Ocean. This dynamic group of young people live in urban and rural areas, on remote islands and in large cities. They have diverse sexualities and gender identities. They are young people living with disabilities, they are sex workers, they are young women and men living with HIV and AIDS.
This paper supports the case for a transformative goal on gender equality, women’s rights and women’s empowerment. The case for a stand-alone gender-related goal, as well as addressing gender priorities into each goal, has been actively supported by Pacific Leaders and the women’s movement. The importance of a standalone goal in post-2015 development agenda was evident at the 12th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women held 2013.
The overall message of the four-day meeting was that there can be no realisation of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) for Pacific women without attention to issues of bodily integrity and autonomy, and that no gender equality is possible without realisation of full human rights and social justice - including core focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The forum provided a secure place for diverse Pacific feminist and human rights civil society organisations, networks and advocates from across the Pacific region to:
Every day, 20,000 girls below age 18 give birth in developing countries. Births to girls also occur in developed countries but on a much smaller scale. Most of the world’s births to adolescents— 95 per cent—occur in developing countries, and nine in 10 of these births occur within marriage or a union. About 19 per cent of young women in developing countries become pregnant before age 18. Girls under 15 account for 2 million of the 7.3 million births that occur to adolescent girls under 18 every year in developing countries.
This factsheet explains the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) by answering the following questions:
- What is CEDAW?
- What is the role of the UN CEDAW Committee?
- What are CEDAW General Recommendations?
- How is the implementation of CEDAW monitored?
- What are Concluding Observations?
- What is the CEDAW 'Follw Up' Procedure?
- What is the CEDAW Optional Protocol?
- What is the status of CEDAW ratification and reporting in the • Pacific?
Pacific Islands Forum Leaders have acknowledged the importance of gender equality through the Pacific Plan and in various Forum Communiqués. The purpose of this brief is to draw the attention of Pacific delegates attending the Rio +20 conference to the importance of gender equality and to ensure contributions to the global sustainable development agenda and negotiations take into consideration gender equality commitments made at the regional and international levels.
The Revised Pacific Platform For Action is a regional charter developed and agreed to by representatives from all Pacific Island countries and territories. It has four strategic themes:
- Mechanisms to promote the advancement of women.
- Women’s legal and human rights.
- Women’s access to services.
- Economic empowerment of women.
This report focuses on the experiences of adolescent pregnancy and motherhood. It highlights the challenges that adolescent mothers face when pregnant and as mothers.
Over the last decade, young women’s fertility rates (ages 15-19) across the Pacific have declined in eight countries. However, in five countries (Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu) rates have remained high, at over 50 of births to women 15-19 years per 1,000 women 15-19 years.
This review looks at progress toward the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action’s goals on the following themes:
- Sexual and reproductive health and rights.
- Health, morbidity and mortality.
- Family wellbeing and society.
- Gender and empowering women.
- Population and Sustainable development.
- Population change and social development challenges.
- Urbanisation and internal migration.
- International migration and development.
- Population development and education.
The reproductive risk index ranks 21 of the 22 Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs) according to ten key sexual and reproductive health and rights indicators. In doing so, the RRI provides a comprehensive overview of the sexual and reproductive health and rights environments in individual PICTs, how these compare to each other, and combines them to build a clear regional picture of sexual and reproductive health and rights.
In the lead-up to the Beijing Conference, the Pacific Islands region adopted the Pacific Platform for Action (PPA). Its purpose was to identify regional issues and priorities within those Critical Areas and to put them into a local context. The framework was subsequently reviewed and a Revised Pacific Platform for Action on Advancement of Women and Gender Equality (RPPA) was endorsed in 2004.
The Australian Government is committed to the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – agreed targets set by the world’s nations to reduce poverty by 2015. The MDGs include halving extreme poverty, getting all children into school, closing the gap on gender inequality, saving lives lost to disease and lack of health care, protecting the environment and working on a global partnership for development. Gender equality is central to achieving these goals.
Health pandemics have specific and severe impacts on the lives of women and girls. Since the COVID-19 outbreak first had reported cases, the gendered impacts began being documented in the Pacific and across the world. Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by crises. Existing gender inequalities are exacerbated during a crisis, with the result that women and girls face even higher rates of violence, sexual abuse and control from their husbands, partners and families.