Bildimap olgeta woman blong lidas

At the moment I am working with a women’s group on a leadership project, helping them to develop a strategy (developing a training course, getting proper support from political parties and government etc) to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Depending on which way you look at it its either a hugely challenging project or one with enormous potential… currently there is one woman on one of the two municipal councils, no women on the 6 provincial councils and 2 female MPs out of 52 in parliament, and an unknown (but likely to be small) number on village councils and clearly no women on the council of chiefs. The project was meant to begin in April of this year in order to have some influence on the expected June/July 2008 general election. Unfortunately due to funding problems and lack of staff within the organisation I am working with the project has slipped a bit....
As most of the dozen or so (!) political parties have already confirmed their candidates the project is unlikely to have an impact on an election that will probably happen in 8 months time so I think the focus will be more on building up women to stand for local and provincial elections. As its a long term issue its clearly valuable to try and start something as soon as possible anyway. The familiar attitude towards women was summed up rather nicely by the chair of the malvataumauri (council of chiefs) a few years ago when Vanuatu signed up to CEDAW (UN convention on the elimination of discrimination towards women- the primary international treaty on women’s rights) when he warned women “not to take CEDAW to start thinking highly of themselves and forgetting their place in society,”….not sure if anyone mentioned that he may have missed the point.