This Thematic Brief discusses five key messages about the emerging impacts of COVID-19 on adolescent girsl in the Pacific:
Fiji has one of the highest rates of domestic and sexual violence in the world with almost two-thirds of the country’s women experiencing domestic or sexual violence during their lifetime. This has serious negative impacts on individuals, families, communities and workplaces. For the three companies included in this study, the high rates of domestic and sexual violence translate into lost staff time and reduced productivity that is equivalent to almost 10 days of lost work per employee each year.
Each year, businesses and the public sector in Fiji are losing an average of 12.7 workdays per employee due to the responsibilities of working parents. Limited, unregulated and inaccessible childcare options for children aged zero to five result in absenteeism, lateness, low productivity, distraction, exhaustion and stress for working parents.
This report looks at how gender-differentiated domestic work burdens impact the ability of women to allocate their labour to the cultivation, harvesting and processing of coffee and cocoa.
The report identifies gender-disaggregated trends in time allocation and links these patterns to household welfare outcomes. The note also outlines recommendations to improve outcomes for women in Papua New Guinea within these two sectors.
The State, Society and Governance in Melanesia program at the Australian National University and the International Women’s Development Agency undertook the Do No Harm research project in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to understand whether and in what ways economic inclusion and empowerment initiatives affect women’s experience of violence.
This research, exploring connections between women’s economic empowerment initiatives and increased violence against women in Solomon Islands, found that any equation between women’s economic empowerment and domestic violence is not always straightforward.
This research, exploring connections between women’s economic empowerment initiatives and increased violence against women in two provinces of Papua New Guinea and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, found that the economic advancement that many women are achieving rarely translates into actual empowerment, because they are rarely able to negotiate a decrease in domestic workloads when they bring income — often the only income — into the household.
This research, exploring connections between women’s economic empowerment initiatives and increased violence against women in two provinces of Papua New Guinea and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, found that the economic advancement that many women are achieving rarely translates into actual empowerment, because they are rarely able to negotiate a decrease in domestic workloads when they bring income — often the only income — into the household.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacts beyond people’s health that affect different aspects of day-to-day life. All people will be impacted in some way and must adapt to the pandemic, however men and women – or different groups of men and women – will not all be affected in the same ways. This is due to women and men play different roles and have different responsibilities in their homes and communities.