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 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 Pacific Young Women’s Leadership Alliance is a network of regional, international, and locally based organisations working with and for young women leaders across the Pacific region. The Alliance’s strategy focuses on five key themes, supporting young women to be: Safe, Respected, Included, Connected, and Skilled. The goal of the Alliance is to provide a network to share information, and best practices and resources; and provide a united voice to ensure that governments, donors, and other stakeholders are accountable to the needs of young Pacific women.
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.
This study deals with research on eight critical areas of concern covered in the Revised Pacific Platform for Action 2005-2015: education, health, climate change and environment, economic empowerment, gender mainstreaming, leadership and decision-making, violence against women and human rights.
While gender research on each issue exists in one way or another in the Pacific, there are many unknowns as to the scope, nature, and quality of this research. This study therefore:
- Maps and provides a gap analysis of existing gender research in the eight thematic areas.
Equality Matters is a five‑year strategy developed to increase equality of development outcomes for women, men, girls and boys across the Australian‑funded aid program in Papua New Guinea. It also aims to support women’s empowerment. As such, the strategy responds to, and is aligned with both Papua New Guinea’s and Australia’s gender equality commitments.
The strategy contains:• An outline the Papua New Guinean Government’s gender policy consultation findings and directions.
With the theme of ‘Celebrating our Progress, Shaping our World’, the Conference highlighted the progress made so far towards gender equality while recognising that the Pacific Islands region has a long way to go to achieve substantive gender equality. The conference made a number of recommendations regarding the priority areas of violence against women, health and access to services, as well as on gender disaggregation in the context of the ‘data revolution’.
Ministers and officials responsible for women’s ministries and departments in 19 Pacific Island countries and territories attended the Fifth Pacific Women’s Ministerial Meeting in 2013.
The overall objective of the Fifth Pacific Women’s Ministerial Meeting was to consider the outcomes and recommendations from the 12th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women and to agree on ways to effectively integrate gender equality into national and regional development agenda.