Pacific Peoples’ Partnership has produced forty-five years of programming in over fifteen countries, and we are among the only Canadian NGOs to have delivered programming in West Papua.
Our current programming is focused on promoting climate resilience and gender equity in South Pacific communities, and on facilitating knowledge exchange between Pacific Islanders and the Indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Program highlights include Papua: Land of Peace, featuring a women’s cooperative serving 2000 women, HIV/AIDs prevention clinics and Indigenous rights campaigns; our Climate Resilience Fund, a responsive fund for Pacific Island communities to address gaps in disaster aid; and Red Tide: First Peoples’ Climate Summit, held on Maori territory in January, 2018.
Our educational programming is global in reach. We regularly produce our Pacific Stream live broadcast events featuring dialogue from Indigenous peoples and Pacific Islanders on issues that matter. Consider tuning in to an upcoming broadcast online or in person, or participating in a live broadcast as a speaker or artist.
Historical program highlights include:
EcoWoman: Developing Women’s Leadership in Environmental Management: Bringing together professional and grassroots women to share their respective knowledge and expertise, the aim of this project was to enhance Pacific women’s understanding and use of science and technology in order to improve their lives and participate effectively in environmental management and sustainable development in their communities.
EcoWoman empowered Pacific women to create holistic, people-centered, environmentally sustainable approaches to science and technology. Women from a diversity of social backgrounds worked together to solve environmental problems in their communities. Some of the outcomes of this program were a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) video, ten PRA village-based workshops, and the development of a project that addressed the water hyacinths that clog the Toga River.
Wainimate: Wainimate was established by Fijian women in 1993 in response to concerns about the loss of traditional medicine knowledge and medicinal plants in Fiji and other parts of the Pacific. PPP and Wainimate recognized that Pacific women face an enormous task as they confront economic development and unprecedented environmental challenges, and in 1998, PPP joined the project as a Canadian partner.
Bearing many of the responsibilities of maintaining Pacific communities, women are often most directly affected by inappropriate development practices and structural adjustment decisions that threaten their families, health and environment. The women of Wainimate established a vision to document, reclaim and promote the use of traditional medicine, and to develop a campaign to conserve medicinal plants, employing the theme Save the Plants That Save Lives.
Wainimate established gardens within urban hospitals and rural health centers, and trained hundreds of nurses, doctors, dentists and health administrators in the identification, use and cultivation of plants. And, perhaps most importantly, Wainimate worked closely with Ministry staff to develop national legislation and a strategy platform, which officially and effectively integrated the provision of traditional medicine within the national health care strategy and delivery program.
Indigenous Peoples Abroad Program (IPAP): IPAP provided opportunities for young professionals from First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities to engage directly in sustainable development initiatives, sharing skills, knowledge and cultural perspectives with Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific. Funded by Foreign Affairs Canada, the Indigenous Peoples’ Abroad Programme placed nearly one hundred young professionals from every region of Canada with Indigenous-led Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), governments, professional associations and multilateral agencies in Fiji, Vanuatu, The Cook Islands, The Solomon Islands and Indonesia as well as in New Zealand Maori communities.
Projects were based on mutually defined priorities and included initiatives promoting good governance and anti-corruption, sustainable resource management, marine and terrestrial environmental policy development. Social work, health, justice and legal defense, trade policy development, peace-building and youth empowerment.