REPRESENTATIVES from 11 Pacific Island countries participating at the 8th meeting of the Pacific Women’s Network Against Violence Against Women members have agreed that a critical concern for them is that programs to end violence against women and girls must emerge from local women’s human rights groups and be sensitive to the community context.
The 60 men and women representing civil society, government, intergovernmental agencies and donors are participating in the biennial meeting taking place at the Warwick Resort in Sigatoka this week.
Ofa Guttenbeil-Likiliki, the Director of Tonga Women and Children Crisis Centre said programs that have been home-grown in the Pacific, that have been designed by Pacific people for Pacific contexts, as opposed to cut-and-paste programs that are brought from different regions of the world, are the ones that work.
“These initiatives are brought in with good intentions by some donors and international non-governmental organisations, who do not realise that we actually already have best-practice models operating in the Pacific.
“There are some models we would be able to share with the rest of the world that speak to the very experience of leaders in this area such as Shamima Ali from the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC) and Merilyn Tahi from the Vanuatu Women’s Centre (VWC).
“This is a real conversation that we’ve had this week and it’s also an opportunity for us to speak our truth about some of these programs that invade our Pacific spaces and often don’t work out.
“When the funding for these programs come to a stop they collapse and we have to pick up the pieces because we are the ones that continue to live in our communities,” Ms Guttenbeil-Likiliki said.
Represented at the meeting are: Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.
The theme of discussions at the meeting is for home-grown initiatives in the Pacific to address violence against women and girls have better chances of succeeding and bringing about change, than overseas-designed programs that are implemented with good intentions but in the wrong context.
The meeting ended today.
