This research project was aimed at synthesising and integrating various experiences and perspectives on poverty held both by poor women and men and by professional poverty experts. The project team began with a review of the professional knowledge contained in the vast multidisciplinary literature on gender and poverty, gender and development, and gender-sensitive measures of poverty.
This short paper reports on planned research in Fiji, the first country in the Pacific to pilot a measure of poverty at an individual level from a gender perspective.
At the opening of the 2014 State of the Pacific Conference organised by the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop noted the Australian Government’s commitment to expanding the Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) and the contribution that labour mobility could make to development in the Pacific. In the minister’s words, ‘some seasonal workers have earned up to $12,000 in Australia, and have been able to remit about $6,000 over a six month placement, the scheme is having flow-on benefits.