Niue MP O'Love Jacobsen at a wānanga for Pacific women MPs at New Zealand's Parliament, 8 August 2023. Photo: Johnny Blades VNP
This week thirty-one women MPs from around the Pacific region visited Wellington, New Zealand for a development and connection event at Parliament.
They represented the majority of women MPs from the eleven Pacific countries they hail from.
It's a region where the vast majority of elected representatives have always been men, where the institutional and social barriers to women standing for parliaments around the region are deeply entrenched.
Johnny Blades from "The House" sat down for a chat about these barriers and how to overcome them with several of the visiting Pacific MPs, beginning with Geraldine Paul, an elected representative in the autonomous Papua New Guinea region of Bougainville.
