When the World Humanitarian Summit convened in Istanbul in 2016, the humanitarian sector resembled one of the last bastions of patriarchy. All-male panels were common. ActionAid arrived with a small delegation of women from Vanuatu, who were among the very few Pacific women present. Most Pacific delegations included no women at all.
That same year, the Shifting the Power Coalition was born. A decade on, ActionAid and partners gathered to mark its tenth anniversary and to look back at how far Pacific women’s leadership in climate and humanitarian action has come.
A room full of men
Regional spaces at the time were no different from the global ones. Pacific governments and international NGOs alike were dominated by men. In the regional meeting on climate change in 2016, every country representative in the room was a man, apart from the secretary. The discussion that followed was entirely gender blind, and the absence of Pacific women’s voices was impossible to miss.
Two cyclones made the problem even starker. When Cyclone Pam struck Vanuatu in 2015, the late Dorosday Kenneth, then Director of Women’s Affairs, reported that women in affected areas had no voice or representation in the disaster response. When Cyclone Winston hit Fiji in 2016, the situation was different but no better. Fiji had a powerful and capable feminist movement, yet it was completely shut out of the gender and protection assessment carried out by humanitarian agencies, even though these were the people working every day to protect women’s rights and safety.
A necessary response
The Coalition was born in this aftermath, and the need to address the systemic exclusion of Pacific women from the humanitarian system. Shifting the Power was not just about shifting power from international to local, from men to women, but also shifting power within the women’s movement. Right from the outset the Coalition committed to support the leadership of young women and women with disabilities, recognising that the same handful of women were being invited to every regional meeting on gender, and that there was a need to support emerging and more diverse leadership.
While the Coalition’s membership has shifted slightly over the years, today it includes 15 women-led organisations across eight Pacific countries, including Bougainville, Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.
What has not changed are the Coalition’s core values: feminist collaboration, openness, diversity, mutual benefit, equity and intergenerational collaboration. Partners describe it as a space where young women and women with disabilities have grown within the movement through training, mentoring across generations, and access to opportunities and resources to lead. It has also given Pacific women-led organisations room to expand their role in climate and humanitarian action by learning from one another, working together within and across borders, leading inclusive rapid responses, and shaping government policy.
From seed funding to national systems
The Coalition began with almost nothing: a little seed funding from ActionAid to bring people together, and a clear vision of elevating the leadership and innovation Pacific women already had.
That vision has borne fruit. Sharon Bhagwan Rolls and Adivasu Levu had founded Women’s Weather Watch in Fiji through FemLINKPacific and shared that knowledge with the ActionAid team in Vanuatu. They adapted it into a Ni-Vanuatu women-led early warning system, Women Wetem Weta, which now reaches half of the country’s population and is embedded in the National Emergency Operations Centre. Women-led early warning systems now also operate in Bougainville, PNG, Tonga and Fiji, reaching communities that government systems cannot.
Collaboration through the Coalition between Vanuatu Disability Promotion and Advocacy association and ActionAid Vanuatu also led to the creation of Women I Tok Tok Tugeta Sunshine in 2018. It now brings together more than 1,000 women with disabilities and sits at the heart of the wider Women I Tok Tok Tugeta movement, which is at the forefront of driving women-led and inclusive humanitarian response. Most Coalition partners have similarly deepened their relationships with disability organisations in their own countries.
The Coalition’s growth has been supported by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Pacific Women Lead, enabling it to stand at the forefront of inclusive early warning and humanitarian action. It is led by a Regional Hub team based in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, which leads with humility, care and respect, modelling feminist leadership in practice, and is supported through a secretariat based out of ActionAid Australia.
The work ahead
The next decade will bring harder tests. With global warming expected to exceed 1.8 degrees, Pacific islands face a future of worsening floods, cyclones and disasters. Investing in Pacific women’s leadership, and in climate and humanitarian action that is gender responsive and inclusive, is not optional. It is essential to stop climate disasters from deepening gender inequality and violations of the rights of people with disabilities. To be most effective that response must be led by the people most affected and on the frontlines of this crisis.