Lisa Horiwapu provides an overview of critical issues in the Pacific: The political, economic and environment challenges are affecting Pacific peoples’ well being as well as relationships they have with each other. Among the most pressing ones is the climate change that is challenging traditional livelihood and in some, serious cases the existence of the land we live in. It is vanishing at a faster rate for most of our islands. This is putting our women’s role in addressing or trying to address these issues an important one among many others. The emerging issues session includes presentations from various speakers who spoke on the topics, Communicating women, peace and security from the local to the global arenas through the media and ICTs, labour migration in Kiribati and its migration in dignity policy and gender perspective of climate change in the Marshalls. Veena Singh of FemLINKPACIFIC talked about the importance of communication and ICTs. She highlighted that media be seen as a tool to promote the advancement of women and girls. She talked about ways in which the organisation she works for advocates for women, peace and security issues using the media. Ms Veena also talked about the regional network on the women peace and security 1325 that Femlink pacific coordinates. She said it has many contributions into the formation of the regional action plan on 1325 – RAP. The presentation by Ms Anne from the Kiribati government delegation on labour migration talked about the issue of seafarers, which started way back with the inclusion of women in 2005 and its challenges. She said it stopped a few years back because of the many challenges the women faced such as having pregnancies and receiving harassment while on the boats as stewards and chefs. This she said also prevented families from allowing their women and girls although they knew the money they received helped them a lot. She added that there was also a pilot program supported by Australian Aid years back to get I –Kiribati women to up skill themselves in nursing when doing their diplomas or degrees courses. Ms Anne said this is all in preparations for their migrations from the effects of climate change that is very evident in the Islands and they face the issue of their elderly not wanting to move at all. Yoshiko from the Marshalls talked about some of the impacts the climate change is having on their country. She said the lands are drying out thus their food security including water is threatened. These issues are the same with us back home. The session kept reminding me of the importance of my organisations advocacy work as a media organisation and the mitigation processes. I thought about my island and comparing the issues raised by Kiribati and Marshalls are finally hitting home. I have the hope that now our Solomon Islands Government has its climate change office within the Ministry of Environment and a gender focal point within the department, they will aggressively look into the formulation of a policy on climate change soon.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:41:59 +0000
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