conference junkie/ junket

I’ve come to realize that in Vanuatu you can spend large chunks of your life in one of the 4 smart hotels in Port Vila attending conferences or workshops of one kind or other. Having managed to avoid attending any of these events until recently I’ve been to two in the last two weeks. I’m not sure why the concentration of these events is so great I guess it’s just the smallness of Vila/ Vanuatu that makes it feels like it is being swamped and that there seems to be some conference or other taking place pretty much every week.

So last week I spent the first three days of the week at the 4* Meridian Hotel (quite smart, on the lagoon, bit anonymous) at the CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) Sub-regional implementation workshop which was useful not only because the content of the conference was directly relevant to my work but also because it meant I would be able to buttonhole a couple of the women I haven’t been able to track down.

There were 4 country delegations at the conference, from Fiji, Samoa, Cook Islands and Vanuatu. All of them there to discuss the recommendations handed out to each country by the UN CEDAW committee. The discussions were organized over 4 issues which are pertinent to all 4 countries; violence against women, women’s access to healthcare, women and employment and women’s participation in politics and government. I sat with the Vanuatu delegation and there was some interesting discussion but nothing that hasn’t already been written, said or agreed to several times. It was really unfortunate that there wasn’t a session where the delegates got to discuss the issues in detail with the delegates from the other countries as these countries are always being told to work together as a region, it seemed a bit of a stupid missed opportunity and was really just another talking shop.