Meet Eleanor Jackson, IWDA Program Manager – Papua New Guinea

Eleanor Jackson - Overseas Program Manager - Papua New Guinea

Eleanor Jackson is IWDA’s Overseas Program Manager for Papua New Guinea and is currently working on five projects alongside our partners:

• Freedom from family and sexual violence, Eastern Highlands Family Voice;
• Women, communities and police addressing sexual and gender-based violence in the Highlands, Kup Women for Peace;
• Raising the voices of women on land and resources, Wide Bay Conservation Association;
• Raising young women and men’s voices on climate change issues, Tulele Peisa;
• and East New Britain Sexual Health Improvement Project, Burnet Institute, Cairns Sexual Health Centre, East New Britain Provincial Health, Melbourne Sexual Health Centre.

IWDA volunteer, Iona Roy, spoke with Eleanor to find out why development work is important to her.

Part One

How long have you been involved with development work?

I suppose formally in the international development sector for about six or so years, but prior to that I’d also volunteered as a p2aralegal advisor with the Women’s Legal Service of Victoria. I was working as a domestic violence legal counsellor which included family breakdown and women’s legal issues. But formally, in terms of international development, about six years.

Before IWDA I worked as a consultant for an Australian managing contractor organisation that subcontracts for AusAID. I worked on an ASEAN project—so a very long acronym—but that was basically a capacity development program that looked at a whole range of ASEAN priority sectors, at which they wanted skills exchange and training, often for high level bureaucrats and ministerial staff. So it could be anything from fish training to customs standards. So it was a different level of development because that’s at a very bureaucratic and country to country diplomatic level rather than at the grass roots level.

I then spent some time volunteering in PNG working for Provincial Aids Committee in an island called New Ireland, doing program management support for their provincial HIV program. That was based at the Kavieng Hospital, and working with a couple of pretty dedicated staff who were working with some relatively limited resources, but trying to increase awareness and co-ordinate HIV activities both in terms of counseling and training and awareness, as well as access to treatment for HIV positive people.

Then I worked for Oxfam for a couple of years; in their emergency response work; program management; and then managing their field office based in Port Moresby.

What drives you to work for social change?

I think it is really connected to my family background. My dad is a seventh generation Australian and my mum is a first generation Australian, so she migrated here from the Philippines and I’ve always had a really strong connection through them with the Filipino-Australian community, and diaspora community issues.

I’ve also been keenly aware and grateful of opportunities that have been afforded to me as an Australian, particularly sometimes relative to my own family in the Philippines. Also, being really conscious and aware that for the coincidence of geography, of my mum deciding to get a job in Australia at a time when migration was a lot easier than it is now in some senses. They had been involved in a Filipino-Australia trades people association, they helped with multilingual radio program, and set up a Filipino-English newspaper here for newly arrived migrants.

So that was my family background, which has always made me feel like there are great numbers of people out there who are less fortunate than ourselves, and being in the position to help them is, in some senses, a really lucky responsibility – you actually feel oddly grateful to work for social change, because those inequities are sometimes so obvious and our ability to help is so clear.

So I think you’ve answered my next question, which is why do you think this kind of work is so important. Do you have anything else to add?

Number one I feel there’s a huge moral imperative to try and help those less fortunate than you. But that in some senses sounds like those less fortunate people don’t have really great skills themselves; where actually what you are doing is helping people who are already helping themselves, and being a part of a really great endeavor which is about people trying to improve the choices and options that are available to them in their lives.

What are some of the approaches and methods you use in your work? Do you need to have a different approach to this kind of work?

Well I work predominately in PNG, so in terms of how I work, I try to listen well and listen respectfully in a way that acknowledges that we come from different cultures, and have different ways of working. I think particularly in working with communities in PNG, I like to value some of the special strengths that Pacific communities bring: respect for collaboration and consensus, and working together, as opposed to ‘my idea is right, your idea isn’t, so take on board my idea’.

Otherwise I also think that I have been influenced by lots of reading and thinking about participation; ideas that communities themselves both have a right to be involved in the decisions in their lives that affect them, but also have particular and valuable skills that make them really well placed to influence the conditions that affect their lives. Which sounds absolutely like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised in some senses how different that can be to really traditional models of development.

Participation is definitely a way of working that I try to reflect at a personal level, in terms of being a good listener, embracing other ideas, and helping people come to a shared agreement about which way forward.

How do you find the balance between embracing the culture and trying to change those views?

In some senses, cultures that are marked by high levels of gender inequality – where women have less access to education, or women are marginalised in terms of formal representation or experience high levels of violence – it isn’t necessarily the same thing to say people acknowledge and accept gender inequality as a per se fact. A lot of women, themselves, appreciate that it is unfair that they don’t access education equally, or it’s unfair that they experience such high levels of violence or that so many of them die in childbirth. Most women recognise that and even quite a lot of men will acknowledge that that is a bad situation. So I don’t necessarily think that, even places where culture is commonly described as the barrier to gender equality, there isn’t any wiggle room or room for conversation. It’s that as a whole system as opposed to a set of personal acknowledgments it’s a much harder thing to tackle.

So, I do find it difficult. I guess it’s more difficult for me working as a woman – it’s harder to feel respected and valued in certain forums – but I try to stand my ground and be as competent as I can be so they can take me on my merits. But I would also say Papua New Guinean culture has changed a lot, even in the last 100 years. And I also think our ideas about cultural changes, sometimes, really are over inflated.  We have seen enormous changes in the lives of everyday women in the last 100 – 150 years in Australia, but we still have very low representation of women as head of boards, low representation in government, high levels of domestic violence, disproportionate impacts of women who are from low socio-economic backgrounds or have less education themselves, and different ways in which they will be more vulnerable to a whole range of different bad things, like poverty or gender-based violence.

I still think that being realistic about the rate of change required in a culture is important but also not taking it for granted that cultures don’t change, and that cultures don’t change from within. I think that there are many Papuan New Guinean women and men working from within to try and think about what kind of society they would like to live in and how they might go about making it better.

What do you like most about working as a program manager?

I like meeting with the partners and having a chance to see the places where they work and the communities that they work with. I think that is a really important grounding to have and I feel lucky to be able to meet those people in person because they are often working under really hard circumstances with limited resources and they’re just absolutely committed, amazing leaders in their own right. So to be able to meet women like that is actually a pretty cool experience – and then to call it work is even better!

But I also really like talking with members of the general public about development. I think sometimes inside the whole industry you can come to think that it is very normal to worry about infant and maternal mortality rates in another country that you don’t live in. But a lot of people have not even really heard much about what goes on in the developing world beyond the occasional tourism opportunity to go somewhere really cheap and really exotic. I think sometimes one of the most exciting parts of my job is talking about it with ordinary people so they might get a better idea about what goes on, what kind of realities people are facing in their lives.

How often do you get to travel to the different projects?

Probably only once or twice per year. Arguably IWDA has less funding that we direct to in-country visits. So in some organisations you would probably travel more, but we also run a pretty small program and have relatively low overheads. It’s bad for the environment to go all the time. So we do try to use telephone and email as much as we possibly can, but it is sometimes hard as a lot of places don’t always have good telephone communication and a lot of email is still really unreliable in the Pacific. It’s actually so much nicer to be able to meet in person, and some things need to be worked out in person.

What are some of the problems you encounter working in this field and how do you overcome them?

I think that one of the biggest problems that you face is that people are often trying to do quite a lot with very little. So, even in the instance with IWDA, often we are juggling multiple things, trying to wear more than one hat at the same time. That means that sometimes people are busy, or they’re stretched to do things in ways that they wished they had more time, or more space, or more support to do a bit better. So I guess in a resource constrained environment, trying to make the most of what you’ve got is a real challenge.

Stay tuned by Part Two of Eleanor’s interview…

Tags: Papua New Guinea

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 under Papua New Guinea, Recent.