This brief provides examples of gender transformative changes achieved by initiatives in Papua New Guinea. It describes practical, proven approaches for gender-transformative change and highlights the importance of:
- Program design explicit in its aim to reshape gender norms and power relations.
- Working in partnership with organisations and community groups to create change.
- Drawing on community strengths, customs and practices.
- Clearly aligning activities to support government policy commitments and strengthen government systems.
This report summarises the workshop approach, objectives, key learning outcomes and participant recommendations of the third Pacific Women and Fiji Women’s Fund Fiji Annual Reflection and Planning Workshop.
The primary objectives of the workshop were for participants to:
- Reflect on overall progress in advancing gender equality at various levels.
- Share experiences and lessons learned in promoting women’s economic empowerment, enhancing women’s leadership opportunities and capabilities, ending violence against women and coalition building.
The Pacific Girl Inception Workshop was held from 21–25 October 2019 in Suva, Fiji. The week-long workshop comprised the following meetings:
- One-day Girls Pawa Toktok with adolescent girls from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Vanuatu.
- Two-day Partners Meeting with selected civil society organisation partners from Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.
- The Pacific Girl Regional Learning Network meeting.
This document provides details about the Australian Government’s investment in supporting adolescent girls in the Pacific. It includes information about:
The fifth Pacific Women in Papua New Guinea Annual Learning Workshop offered an opportunity for Pacific Women-funded and non-funded partners to come together to discuss their work and research and to share lessons about what is working, the challenges, and the opportunities for promoting gender equality in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific.
This toolkit provides sequential activities to support organisations to ensure that gender equality and the empowerment of women are integrated into their programming. The activities are: 1. Exploring Our Own Expertise About Gender and Diversity. 2. Social and Personal Identity Wheel. 3. Exploring Our Diversity. 4. The Story of Joana and Jona. 5. Choosing the sex of your child. 6. Ideal Man, Ideal Woman. 7. Pressures and Privileges of Being a Man/Woman. 8. Definitions. 9. The New Planet. 10. Group Activity. 11. Power Walk. 12. Power Role Play. 13. The Gender Equality Framework. 14.
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.
This report summarises the workshop approach, objectives, key learning outcomes and participant recommendations of the third Pacific Women and Fiji Women’s Fund Fiji Annual Reflection and Planning Workshop.
The workshop objectives were to:
- Enable Fiji Government, civil society and stakeholders to reflect on overall progress and key issues to advance gender equality in Fiji.
- Update grantees of the Fund on findings from its six-monthly report analysis.
Findings from this study include:
- There is a knowledge gap amongst school-aged girls related to menstruation and reproductive health more generally. This lack of knowledge also extends to the school-aged boys and mothers.
- Some teachers interviewed indicated that they were unaware that Menstrual Hygiene Management is part of the curriculum.
- Traditional beliefs and practices related to menstruation are strong in Kiribati communities, in both the urban and rural settings. These traditional beliefs affect girls’ lives in a number of intersecting ways.
The fourth Pacific Women in Papua New Guinea Annual Learning Workshop provided an update on activities, research, innovation, and good practice undertaken by Pacific Women and its partners in 2017-2018 in the areas of:
- Increasing women’s leadership and decision making.
- Increasing economic opportunities for women.
- Reducing violence against women and expanding support services.
Key findings from this research into women’s and girl’s experiences of menstruation in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are:
- Adolescent girls and women face a number of challenges that influence their ability to manage menstruation effectively and with dignity; these challenges interact, and have the potential to negatively influence physical and emotional health, participation at school, work and in the community, and impact the environment.
Key findings from this research into women’s and girl’s experiences of menstruation in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are:
- Adolescent girls and women face a number of challenges that influence their ability to manage menstruation effectively and with dignity; these challenges interact, and have the potential to negatively influence physical and emotional health, participation at school, work and in the community, and impact the environment.
Key findings from this research into women’s and girl’s experiences of menstruation in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are:
- Adolescent girls and women face a number of challenges that influence their ability to manage menstruation effectively and with dignity; these challenges interact, and have the potential to negatively influence physical and emotional health, participation at school, work and in the community, and impact the environment.
Key findings from this research into women’s and girl’s experiences of menstruation in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are:
- Adolescent girls and women face a number of challenges that influence their ability to manage menstruation effectively and with dignity; these challenges interact, and have the potential to negatively influence physical and emotional health, participation at school, work and in the community, and impact the environment.
Key findings from this research into women’s and girl’s experiences of menstruation in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are:
- Adolescent girls and women face a number of challenges that influence their ability to manage menstruation effectively and with dignity; these challenges interact, and have the potential to negatively influence physical and emotional health, participation at school, work and in the community, and impact the environment.
The case studies of coalitions in Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and Tonga highlight four influential factors in the formation and functioning of coalitions:
Formative events: What brought people together to ‘do something’ in a concerted way? For example, the torture and death of a woman in a sorcery-related violence incident generated the impetus for the formation of the Papua New Guinea coalition examined in this study. Whether formative events are locally or externally driven appears to mould the future shape of a coalition and how it functions.
This study analysed a random selection of 908 cases from seven Pacific Island countries, including 111 domestic violence cases and 787 sexual assault cases. Each case is analysed to determine whether gender stereotypes, customary reconciliation (e.g. apology, forgiveness) or other contentious factors were considered during sentencing. Contentious factors are those factors which, when used in mitigation by the court, discriminate against the victim on the basis of her gender.
Fiji and PNG were part of the World Bank’s qualitative study informing the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, for which local researchers organised focus groups to systematically record the factors that women and men in the study saw as helping to increase their feelings of empowerment.
This paper reports that in Tanah Papua (the western
half of the island of New Guinea, currently
comprising the Indonesian provinces of Papua and
West Papua), there was an HIV prevalence of 2.3% of survey participants, ranging from 0.6% in easily accessible coastal areas to 3% in the highlands. This makes the estimated HIV prevalence in Tanah Papua the second highest in the world outside Africa.
Papuan perspectives on family planning have historically emphasised political concerns that reflect the tensions between the Indonesian state and indigenous rights – Papuans have questioned both the need for them to limit their population size and the propriety of the state to intervene in their reproductive matters. Family planning in Indonesia is said to have stagnated, and rates of contraceptive use in Tanah Papua (the western half of the island of New Guinea, currently comprising the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua) are considerably lower than the Indonesian average.