Nation Builders: Celebrating Women in the Private Sector follows the success of the first publication celebrating women’s leadership and contributions in the public sector. This new project aims to demonstrate the pivotal role that competent women play in leading and...

The Nation-Builders: Celebrating Women in Public Service booklet to mark International Women’s Day 2021 follows closely on the heels of the photographic exhibition commemorating Vanuatu’s 40th Independence in July 2020. Developed through a collaboration between the...

History has shown that the most significant challenges are from which unexpected leaders and heroes often emerge. When asked to write this publication, I leapt at the chance. Here was an opportunity to write the first draft of Vanuatu’s COVID pandemic history, but to...

The Pacific Attitudes Survey: Vanuatu gauges the views of ordinary ni-Vanuatu across a range of themes, including how ordinary citizens engage with and trust their political institutions; their broader understandings of democracy and tradition; and attitudes to key...

Leadership Matters: Benchmarking Women in Business Leadership in the Pacific offers an in-depth analysis of the progress and challenges in elevating women to leadership roles within business across the 14 Pacific developing member countries of the Asian Development...

The Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, last month committed to a revitalised gender equality declaration. This declaration, spearheaded by the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, was subject to extensive consultation across the region....

This report brings together insights from both Pacific and global efforts to engage with men. It was developed with a view to informing how the Australia Awards Women Leading and Influencing (WLI) program (wliprogram.org) engages men in its program activities. WLI is...

A decade ago the Pacific Leaders Gender Equality Declaration (PLGED) was signed in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, in August 2012. Leaders reiterated their commitment (which they actually first made the year before) “to increase the representation of women in legislatures”....

The way politics is played in Melanesian countries has very little national inclusivity about it - in terms of participation by and representation of both men and women at the national level. The role of women is, almost exclusively, to vote, not to actively play the...

Supportive community attitudes are essential in improving’s women’s involvement in leadership and decision making. Initiated through Pacific Women, the Balance of Power is a dedicated leadership program aiming to address the deeply entrenched social norms that define...

In the Vanuatu national elections held on 19 March 2020, voters elected their third consecutive all-male parliament. Across 10 of Vanuatu’s 18 constituencies, only 18 women contested the elections and were significantly outnumbered, representing only six per cent of...

To read the full report click here. Introduction   At the invitation of the Government of Vanuatu, the Commonwealth SecretaryGeneral, Kamalesh Sharma, constituted an Observer Group for the 22 January 2016 General Election. The Commonwealth Observer Group was...

To read the full report click here. Women’s empowerment and political participation are a matter of human rights. While the right to vote and contest elections is now widely available to women all over the world, the goal of gender balance in political institutions is...

Over the past year, Ceridwen Spark have conducted 38 interviews with young, educated women in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Two important findings have already emerged. The first is that young women in Melanesia are subject to intimate forms of...

SPC RRRT is unique in that its programmed base continues to have a gender and a rights-based approach as its foundation. In 1998 RRRT was awarded the prestigious UNICEF Maurice Pate Award for its cutting edge work in gender and human rights and, in 2005, it was chosen...

To read the full report click here. As a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Vanuatu has committed to promoting gender balance in decisionmaking and legislative bodies. CEDAW addresses the issue of...

This project arose out of the United Nations global ‘Lessons Learned Project’ in which the FWRM and the Pacific RRRT jointly examined the application of human rights based approach to legislative reform using the Fiji Family Law Act.1 As a result of examining how...