Interview (Part Two) with Eleanor Jackson – IWDA Program Manager – Papua New Guinea

Last week IWDA volunteer, Iona Roy, spoke with IWDA’s Program Manager for Papua New Guinea, Eleanor Jackson, to find out why development work is important to her. Below is part two of her interview. To read part one, please click here.

Part Two

How are the livelihoods of your project partners and their communities affected by the work that IWDA does, particularly in PNG?

In terms of Wide Bay, what we are actually doing is trying to support women in a remote community in East New Britain which is an island province of Papua New Guinea. We’re trying to support them to find mechanisms to increase women’s participation in land use and natural resource management. It’s an area where women were traditionally custodians of land ownership, in the clan sense, so not as we would formally think of land ownership here. But as more conventional development increases, as people get involved in the market economy, and as logging companies are interested in buying land, land and its use has become more formally the domain of men and male chiefs.  There has been a kind of ‘squeezing out’ of women in terms of “will we sell this land to these loggers?” “Who will we talk about it with?” “Who has an interest in this land?” “Well, we’ll just talk to the men”.

Typically in Papua New Guinea, still 85% of people are living basic rural and agrarian subsistence lifestyles. And a lot of the people who do the gardening to feed the family are women and it becomes really difficult if they don’t have access to land, or to firewood or to water or any of the other basics. People living a subsistence livelihood are really dependant on access to land because they don’t have formal economy alternatives to get a job, to work at a factory or be part of a services industry. Our program is trying to help women work collectively to try and influence the specific decisions that are being made in their own community, using a peer support network of women who are getting together, raising ideas, forming a collective platform, linking them up with stakeholders like other NGO’s, church groups, local leaders. They’re all working on slightly different issues because every community has their own particular interests, but land is so integral, both to cultural identity and your understanding of place in a community, and also very integral to basic livelihoods.

Arguably IWDA’s program is helping women resist some of the threat of the more conventional development forms which ask people to sell of land in order to gain easy resources, but don’t necessary provide more longtime solutions to peoples’ subsistence needs.

Could you tell me a little bit about the East New Britain Sexual Health Improvement Project?

The East New Britain Sexual Health Improvement Project is a co-operation that we have with the Burnet Institute which is another Australian based NGO with a long history in health, both from a research and from a community programs perspective. They have real strengths in HIV and sexual health and we have partnered together with them and the Cairns Sexual Health Centre. Together the three of us are looking at one particular component of a larger AusAID supported project which looks at sexual and reproductive health in East New Britain. We are working with them to develop training modules which will be used in all of the districts of East New Britain. They are training grassroots Stret Tokers (Straight Talkers) – these are people who are based in the community – men and women, usually in equal numbers. They will be equipped and trained with basic community development knowledge and background, basic STI information about how to diagnose (in the sense of “I might have an STI” as opposed to “I’ve been bitten by a bug”), and then what possible avenues there are for treatment. They are also equally training them with skills to understand the implications of gender and how that might relate to sexual health. It is hoped that those Stret Tokers will then, within their communities, run a range of awareness and information sharing activities, which could be anything from handing out condoms to a friend who’s interested to ask about safe sex, to coming and speaking after church and saying “you know, we need to talk about sexual health and how we will improve this, because these are the ways it will affect our community and we can do something to stop it”. Or they could be running a health expo or a training that’s specific and targeted. Either way, it’s encouraging members of the community to try and engage local people with sexual health and to access sexual health services.

It also works in combination with a higher level component the project which is about improving those services, as there are issues with the health services sector in PNG that are both about the supply of quality health services, and the demand for services. As services have continued to be bad for a long while, people are both disenchanted with the idea of going to seek a shoddy service, and then the shoddy services that nobody uses fall even more into disrepair. So the project looks at strengthening both the service delivery at a provincial level, and also at increasing the amount of demand that communities have for better health services in this particular area.

Finally, what are some of the changes you are hoping to see in the future in PNG?

I guess that one of the things I’m watching in the short term future is the new liquid natural gas project, which is estimated to double the GDP of PNG. They’re estimating revenues of a billion dollars or something ridiculous. I would love to see those funds directed in ways that provide for the economic stability of the country, but then also allow for the kinds of social investment and basic service provision that the people of Papua New Guinea really deserve.

There have also been real changes in standard of living in PNG; there’s been 33-34 years of continued democracy in a post independence environment. But I also think, regrettably, that with some gains there have been some real losses, and there’s a lot that the Papua New Guinean government could do to address those losses.

I think there’s been let downs for community members in terms of decreases in life expectancy in some areas, significant increases in infant and maternal health mortality, continued barriers for people to access suitable education, and real cultural changes that have negatively impacted on Papua New Guinean culture and some of its many great attributes. I do recognise there are some really amazing qualities to Papua New Guinean culture; it’s not just a place with high levels of gender inequality, it’s also a place that has had a strong sense of social cohesion and social safety networks and some real qualities that we could maybe learn from here.

So I think the reason I focus on that in particular is because of the extractive industry – the mining, the logging, the fishing, even to an extent copper, and palm oil and cocoa – those kinds of cash cropping. Although, less so than to the same extent as the mines, they haven’t necessarily brought what they promised the community. It’s like an island of gold swimming in an ocean of oil. It’s a place that’s full of resources that people still don’t have basic roads, quality education, water and sanitation; a few basics would be really important, particularly outside of the major regional centres.

Tags: Papua New Guinea

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 under Papua New Guinea, Recent.