Jennifer Kalpokas Doan is a part of the management team of the Balance of Power Initiative in the Pacific. Her father was a leader of the independence movement in Vanuatu and, following in her father’s footsteps, Jennifer has been a tireless advocate for developmental and inclusive leadership in...
Women’s empowerment is a key issue in PNG. However, there is still limited PNG-based evidence on “what works” when it comes to empowering women. In a recent paper, I look at one important component of empowerment, economic autonomy—in particular, women’s level of control over their own and their...
Sorcery accusation related violence (SARV) is a serious problem in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and in many other parts of the world. The secrecy and fear in which it is shrouded make the harm associated with such accusations hard to quantify, but our multi-year research project documented 1553...
In June 2020, two cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) went viral on social media in Papua New Guinea (PNG) sparking public commentary on the specifics of the two cases and the problem of IPV in PNG more broadly. Despite similarities between the two cases, they received divergent responses from...
Why is violence acceptable in PNG? I grew up in an Abelam society where we could scream at the top...
