In Vanuatu, women have long borne the weight of survival without recognition. Now, in the face of climate disaster, they’re rewriting what power looks like. By Justine Cullen.
Life for a single mother on the island of Tanna, in Vanuatu, is grim in ways that are difficult to overstate. Shamed by their families, shunned by their villages, single mothers have almost no chance of remarrying and no real economic prospects. Culturally, a woman’s role is to be a wife — essentially a sanctioned sex slave to her husband. (“It doesn’t matter if you’re tired, you’re sick, you’re dirty, you’re busy,” one woman told me, matter-of-factly. “If your husband wants sex, you do it.”) For many, that life begins as soon as they reach puberty, with marriage and motherhood following almost immediately.
The people of Tanna believe that the more children a woman has, the longer she’ll live. It’s a belief that’s cruelly inverted: more births, here in Vanuatu as everywhere else, mean higher risks of maternal mortality, malnutrition, obstetric complications, long-term illness. On average, women give birth to six or seven children — but many raise far more, taking in the children of relatives on top of their own. Let that sink in. A woman might birth six or seven children over their lifetime, and raise between 10 and 15, often beginning when the mother herself is barely more than a child.
The path of a woman is to bear and look after the children, to house and feed her family—vital roles in any society, and yet here they’re performed without a voice in public life, without social standing independent from men, and under the constant shadow of violence. The Pacific has some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the world, with estimates around 60 per cent — more than twice the global average — and with under reporting so endemic, most people assume the true number is far higher.
But in the remote village of Lawital on Tanna, there’s been a shift. A few years ago, the women there told ActionAid — an NGO focused on poverty, inequality, women’s rights and social justice—that what they needed most, beyond anything else, was light. Around eighty percent of households in Vanuatu have no electricity, and the absence is more than just inconvenient; it dictates the rhythm of daily life. In Lawital, children had to stop on the side of the road to do their homework in the fading daylight on their long walks home after school, because once they eventually made it back to their village, the only light would come from the cooking fires. The smoke burned their eyes and made them sick; many simply dropped out of school altogether. Women walking home from the market after dark were regularly attacked and robbed, sometimes worse. Even in their own homes, there was danger: some kept machetes under their beds to ward off attackers whose faces they couldn’t see in the dead of night. In the medical clinic, women going into labour after sundown delivered their babies by the glow of their husband’s phone torches.
After listening to the women, ActionAid partnered with the Australian government and PowerWells, a Brisbane-based social enterprise that builds solar systems out of e-waste. Together, they brought light to Lawital — but the revolutionary part is that they trained local women to install and maintain the systems. One of those women was Annette, 23, a single mother whose boyfriend — not wanting her to keep the baby — abandoned them while she was still pregnant. (I don’t even want to imagine what an illegal abortion looks like in Tanna.) It was Annette who installed the village street light, although the men dug the hole for her, which was progress in its own way. Now she climbs roofs in a hard hat, hi-vis vest, and sturdy work boots while her child naps nearby. When her first payment came through, she opened a bank account for the first time in her life. She put half the money straight into savings, earmarked for her daughter’s education.
Credit: © Harriet Pratten / ActionAid. Rita Kaltonga (East Efate Community, Mobiliser WITTT ) holds one of her hens. Mama’s Chicken Farming Efate in Epau village, Efate.
But the change was so much more than just financial. The program has so far outfitted 118 homes with renewable power and put ten streetlights where danger used to be routine. The chief is grateful that the women had brought energy to the community. The men are awed that a woman is installing it onto their rooftops. By seizing the opportunity offered to her, Annette has achieved the unthinkable for a single mother in Tanna: respect, status and the possibility of generational change.
When the lights were switched on, the Chief of Lawital threw a party. The Minister for Climate Change came, as did the Minister for Internal Affairs. The Australian High Commissioner showed up. The entire village and all their special guests danced joyfully under the streetlight for hours, until the ground beneath them was churned to mud.
It was a thing worth celebrating. Lawital is safer to walk around at night now. The children can do their schoolwork at home. But there are other impacts too, that maybe weren’t so obvious before the power was turned on. The need for the women to walk miles every day to gather firewood, once a family’s only source of energy, has decreased. Four to five more hours of light a day by which to tend to crops, to weave, means there’s more income in the village. The solar power works on a pay-as-you-go model of about $5 a month for thirty-six months, and the repayments are used to reinvest in livelihoods and other community projects. It is a perfect solution to a multitude of problems—including, maybe most surprisingly, the issue of domestic violence. Prior to the solar project, the men would come home from drinking kava late at night. They’d wake up their wives to demand food, which needed to be prepared in the dark. Violence would ensue; the men were drunk, the women were tired, it was pitch black. But after the power went in, food could be left on the table, lights on. There was no need to wake the women. The opportunity for violence stayed in the shadows.
From the air, the lush islands of Vanuatu look impossible: a hundred shades of green rising out of the blue Pacific, colours so saturated they feel more like a render than reality…
For me, flying in as a mother who has been forced to listen to the song ‘How Far I’ll Go’ too many times to count, it instantly brings to mind Te Fiti from the movie Moana — the benevolent feminine island spirit who possesses the power to create and sustain life, until the demigod Maui (male, of course) steals her heart, and she crumbles and withers. The reference (which, for the record, I’m aware is set in Polynesia, not Melanesia) feels uncomfortably apt. In Vanuatu, women have long been that sustaining force, but they’ve just been more of an untapped resource than a source of power.
Once on the ground I meet Flora Vano, who runs ActionAid Vanuatu. If Vanuatu has a benevolent feminine spirit of its own, it’s Flora. She’s warm and formidable at once, with a way of moving through the world that leaves little doubt she can deliver. On the ride from the airport she points out the marks recent disasters have left — a village ruined by a landslide here, quake damage there. We pass the Blue Lagoon, where in a couple of days we’ll swim in crystal clear turquoise water, and soon after that, a bridge that collapsed during the earthquake last December. The island feels both beautiful and under attack all at once.
Zina Issacc harvesting papaya from her Resilience Garden. Pang Pang Village, Efate. Credit: © Harriet Pratten / ActionAid
And it is under attack. Despite what some ‘world leaders’ would want us to believe, the women of Vanuatu can tell you that climate change is no hoax, nor is it gender neutral. It’s a universal truth that every inequality lived with day to day only sharpens when a crisis hits. Violence escalates. Displacement makes women more vulnerable. Food — generally considered a woman’s remit — becomes scarce. The unpaid care work they already do grows heavier and more invisible at the same time. And in a society where women are effectively locked out of decision-making — at every level, from the village to the national stage — policies and plans rarely account for their needs, so when disaster comes, those needs go unmet. Harm by omission, which is still harm. And so the cycle of inequality continues.
When ActionAid arrived in Vanuatu in 2015 amidst the wreckage of Cyclone Pam, then the most severe tropical storm ever to hit the Southern Hemisphere, there were no women in the national Parliament. (Today, there is one.) The country had gender policies on paper, women had rights, but no one knew about them, and there was no one to hold the government accountable. ActionAid set up three big blue tents in some of the worst-affected areas — spaces where women, absent from public life in almost every other respect, were welcome to gather and speak. Twelve thousand of them showed up. As it turns out, the women of Vanuatu were crying out to be engaged. Meanwhile, the men accused them of wasting their time, which was the clearest proof that such a space was necessary.
Two years later, ActionAid launched the Arise Fund, an initiative built on the idea that if you invest in women’s leadership before disaster strikes — as can be expected more and more often in an intensifying climate crisis — they’ll be ready to respond when it does: their communities will be prepared, their families, homes and crops will be safer, and they’ll better understand how to protect themselves from increased violence. Not only does that preparation save lives and create a more inclusive response, but it also changes the way women are seen in society. As it turns out, a shared solution to the two intersecting issues of climate change and gender inequality gives a power boost to both; it starts to seed gender equality in real time. In Vanuatu, that investment in women’s leadership — a grassroots movement of women, pushing real, tangible change from below — has had transformational impact.
The women named the movement themselves: Women i Tok Tok Tugeta (WITTT) — Bislama for ‘women talking together.’ Today the number of women involved in WITTT counts in the tens of thousands, and the way that talking happens is a feat of organisation in itself: local sister circles have representatives within walking distance who feed into provincial task forces, who talk to island mobilisers, who send representatives to a national forum. When a cyclone looms, information moves along a phone tree of five thousand numbers—fast enough to change outcomes, to get warnings and requests to the people who need it before the damage hits, and making relief faster and more organised.
At the first national WITTT convening in Port Vila, many nominees had never travelled so far from their villages…
At the first national WITTT convening in Port Vila, many nominees had never travelled so far from their villages. Some arrived at the airport without shoes — because they didn’t have any — and were prevented from boarding. Eventually the airport security staff offered up their own. (The women later used their travel per diems to buy those kind men new pairs.) At the other end, greeters waited as instructed with leis, confused when the VIPs they were told to expect never appeared. They were shocked to learn that the delegates were the group of village women waiting quietly in the corner, just as bewildered as they were. At the Holiday Inn, the crisp white sheets felt too foreign to lie on; some women spread sarongs on the floor instead; the bathrooms looked like something from another planet. The point wasn’t to impress or send the women into culture shock, but to show them the respect they deserved. They were gestures of dignity, the first step in a process of emboldening.
Until now, when it came to making decisions on the issues that mattered, men spoke at the front while women stayed at the back, cooking or tending to the children. When the WITTT forums began, the idea of even asking women to share their opinions felt radical. Much of the early training was simply teaching them to speak aloud in public, being comfortable with being heard. By the time I sit down with some of those original delegates ten years on, their fluency is startling. They refer to ministers by name, speak of gaps and laws, about what they want, what needs to change and why. They tell me that they feel different inside themselves now, but also that their husbands treat them differently; their communities treat them differently. Their daughters are starting to have ideas about having careers and helping their communities as well. They’ve been trained in protection, in policy, in climate change, in climate agriculture. Through WITTT they have a direct line to the Ministry of Justice. They’ve seen first hand how they’ve influenced positive change. As part of the Women Wetem Weta (Women’s Weather Watch) program, they’ve even been trained by the Vanuatu meteorological department on the science of weather patterns and how to combine that new knowledge with their own indigenous knowledge. Not that long ago, when they’d tell their husbands that they felt like a cyclone might be coming, they were told be quiet, go back to the home, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Now they sit down with climate change experts, foreigners in suits with scientific backgrounds, and are listened to like academics. And it’s not just the foreigners who are listening to them. The people in the community say, the government didn’t give us light, didn’t give us chickens. The women did. The pride they feel, rightly, is enormous.
Annie Jame walking through Resilience Garden carrying woven palm baskets of produce for sale. Pang Pang Village, Eftate. © Harriet Pratten / ActionAid
(A small aside on the subject of chickens that illustrates how, despite its setbacks, there’s still. so much beauty and kindness in Vanuatu. At some point on our trip, a woman in Tanna gives us a live chicken. It’s a generous gift. With the intention of cooking it when she gets home, ActionAid Operations Manager and Ni-Vanuatu woman, Helen, names the chicken Meat to avoid the beginnings of a companion chicken heartbreak no-one needs. Sitting politely in her box, poking her head out every now and again when the conversation heats up, Meat journeys with us as we bounce along in the back of a ute to the top of Mount Yasa to see the live volcano. She is suitably awed, as we are. She sits between someone’s legs on our charter flight back to Port Vila, and doesn’t complain. She’s such a good chicken, such a part of our sister circle, that Helen can’t bring herself to turn Meat into, well, meat. In the end, our chicken companion lived to see another day. Like all Ni-Vanuatu women, she is a survivor.)
Nowhere is the pride of the women of WITTT more apparent than in the women of WITTT Sunshine, the network created and led by women with disabilities, started in 2018…
Nowhere is the pride of the women of WITTT more apparent than in the women of WITTT Sunshine, the network created and led by women with disabilities, started in 2018. Until then, no agency had ever invited women with disabilities to lead. They had, at times, been recipients— the ones done to, but never the ones shaping what came next for them, and no existing disability network had a gender lens. The name came from Ellen, one of the founding members. She explains it as coming out of the house and into the sunshine. In too many families, daughters or wives with disabilities had been hidden away — an embarrassment, something to be ashamed of. Sunshine was a rejection of that hiding, an invitation to visibility and normalisation. And while the stories at the first dedicated convening of women with disabilities were harrowing—almost every woman in the room had lived through some sort of violence, abuse, or exploitation — the act of sharing them was transformative. What had been a secret shame became a collective truth; there was power in realising that the issues were systemic, and not just them.
But WITTT Sunshine’s real superpower is data. Disability here, just like anywhere else, isn’t one-size-fits-all: a woman who uses a wheelchair has different needs to a woman with a hearing impairment, or one with a speech impediment, or another with a chronic health condition that means she needs special food. By beginning with data, the women of WITTT Sunshine could make their disaster response more effective. Now, WITTT Sunshine members are not just participants, but leaders in disaster planning, climate response and data collection for the next storm. And because they have the data, they’re often the first responders. A WITTT Sunshine member held back tears explaining her shock when the first person who came to offer help after the earthquake was someone in a wheelchair, just like her.
WITTT and WITTT Sunshine members march in Port Vila on World Humanitarian Day, led by Flora Vano (Country Manager, ActionAid Vanuatu). © Harriet Pratten / ActionAid
The issue of climate change can often feel staggeringly impossible and pessimistic…
The issue of climate change can often feel staggeringly impossible and pessimistic. After Cyclone Pam in 2015 came Cyclone Harold in 2020 — right at the onset of Covid — and then, in March 2023, the one-two punch of Cyclones Judy and Kevin, with a 6.5 magnitude earthquake shoved rudely into the middle of it. And as if that weren’t enough, the following Christmas brought a 7.3 quake near Port Vila, toppling houses and killing families just days before the holiday. Disaster stacked on disaster: a relentless demonstration of what the vulnerable Pacific looks like in a heating world — one that richer, higher-polluting nations like Australia help to create, but don’t do nearly enough to protect or rebuild.
When it comes to Vanuatu and our other Pacific neighbours, we can’t pretend to be a distant bystander or a charitable benefactor. We are the trading partner, the regional power — and still one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters. Pacific leaders, including in Vanuatu, have begun framing the expansion of Australia’s newest gas projects not just as bad policy but as, in the words of Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change Ralph Regenvanu, “an internationally wrongful act,” a potential breach of international climate obligations. And that feels just like everyday politics to read about in the news, but to experience it first hand is something else: Port Vila is three hours from Sydney. If you can be this close to a problem and this implicated in its cause, the responsibility seems clear. The moral distance should be shorter than the flight time.
WITTT is a rare good news story inside that darker piece. But despite the overwhelming goodness that’s come from the programs, the choreography still required to navigate the men is frustrating for a card-carrying Western feminist to hear about. Meetings are planned carefully around meal times so the men’s lunch or dinner isn’t late to the table; chiefs are feted and asked to launch initiatives so they can take a kind of ceremonial credit. (At the launch of Mama’s Chickens in East Efate — a community program that provides hens and income-generating egg sales — the chief refused to speak at an event ostensibly for women; instead, he sent an associate to make his speech for him, though he still took a box of the eggs home.)
Each village has its own customs and requires its own diplomacy, but the playbook is precise: they start with climate change. “We start with, how’s your crop? Are you making good money? And the chief will tell us how they’ve had the worst cyclones, flooding,” Flora explains. “From there we have a common agenda that allows us to work with the women.” They don’t enter the room screaming about gender inequality, because the risks are real. Flora says it’s not safe to talk about women’s rights in men’s spaces in Vanuatu. They’ve been warned directly, at times, not to speak about it at all. They can’t be seen as a threat to men, and they can’t burn bridges before they’ve built any.
Sometimes, when ActionAid shows up and asks to talk to the women, the men come instead. Flora is the grand-daughter of a chief herself, and even she will be ignored at first in favour of a man with her (usually a driver). But once alone with the women, eventually the topic can be raised gently: “How are you being perceived at home? In your own village? Are you allowed to talk? Are you able to give your thoughts?” says Flora. “And if they say no, that’s taboo, that’s when we tell them: you were not meant for this.”
The goal isn’t to create conflict, but to create safe spaces. It requires a level of flattery, negotiation, patience, and a level of performative deference that must be maddening, but these women are adept at strategy, because strategy is survival.
The mounting debt of disaster relief and the resulting austerity policies (government measures to reduce budget deficits by cutting spending when the country is in debt and struggling to meet its obligations) means that there’s no police presence — or other public services, like free schooling — on many islands. Chiefs still often resolve abuse by accepting a chicken and a new mat from the abuser and sending the woman straight back to the same house. So WITTT appoints community watchdogs — women who will literally hide another woman in her kitchen, move her from house to house through the night, then shepherd her to a boat at dawn so she can lodge a report elsewhere. This is clandestine, brave work in the face of men who believe things like that’s not your business – I’m the man, that’s my wife, who are you to come and tell me what not to do – let me teach her, let me beat her up, let me do what I want to do – I’ve paid for her, I married her, I’ve given the dowry. It’s a risky situation, and deeply underground. As Flora tells me, if just one woman reveals the existence of the watchdog, the whole thing collapses; the watchdog could be beaten, consequences are immediate and severe..
It’s an extraordinary feat in extraordinary circumstances, and yet it’s just one of dozens of incredible stories I hear in Vanuatu about the work the women are doing. In one village, a tap had been installed but never connected to water; the women were the ones who finally got it done. On the island of Erromango, they mobilised to demand a police post, won, and now they’re lobbying for a second. Two of the mobilisers there have even been named to the chief’s council — progress that once would have been unimaginable. And the men can’t help but recognise it, because the outcomes and benefits to everyone are right there, undeniable.
The women are planning for disaster before it arrives: learning to protect marine ecosystems and manage small-scale fisheries (a project helped by a grant from Australian funding organisation Groundswell), beekeeping as a source of income, and creating seed banks so destroyed crops can be quickly replanted. They’ve adopted a three-garden resilience model — one for the household, one for market income, one kept in reserve as a community buffer. When the Christmas earthquake hit Port Vila last year, women who had been mid-training mobilised within days. They’d travelled to Indonesia and Nepal, had learned from other women how to survive, and were ready. They mapped needs, organised transport, moved supplies—work that would have been impossible for the one overburdened official otherwise tasked with it. While government staff were still flying back from holidays, WITTT was already in the field.
Afterwards, people told Flora that for years they had asked their husbands, their councils, their chiefs, their government for help — and had never received a direct response. Not once. “They ask me, how come it’s happening now?” Flora tells. “I say, things change. Women are coming out.”
As it turns out, Vanuatu never needed a demigod to return its heart. It just needed its women to step into the light.
Go to actionaid.org.au
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