The juxtaposition did not feel like coincidence. It felt like a lesson being failed in real time, by people and institutions that have not yet developed the literacy to recognise what they are looking at.

Drawing on Philip Gourevitch’s book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, she reminds us of the power of words and the signals they give, and the dangers of us now seeing “civilisational annihilation and the quotidian scroll” sitting side by side as somehow normal.

The most dangerous political moment is not the atrocity itself. It is the period before it, when the language that makes the atrocity thinkable …

Krishnan suggests that it is particularly in liberal democracies where the ability to distinguish the difference between political performance and leaders’ intents is increasingly failing. Not least because “you cannot build a self-governing society on the assumption that your leaders are always performing”. And that leaders from India, El Salvador, Italy, Argentina and the United States, as well as the fast-growing nationalist opposition parties in the UK and Australia, understand this vulnerability very well.

The cynicism that sustained rhetorical assault is designed to produce is not a defence against authoritarianism but its precondition, because when nothing means anything and all politics is performance, the loudest and most certain voice wins by default and accountability becomes structurally impossible.

Her provocation is that the declines in global freedom noted by Freedom House, and the fact that six of the ten new “autocratising” countries noted in the latest V-Dem Democracy Report are in Europe and North America, indicate that this pattern lies “not at the margins of the democratic world but inside it”. As the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has recently pointed out, national political leaders in both democracies and authoritarian regimes are bringing “hate-fueled ideas and language into the mainstream, normalising them, coarsening the public discourse and weakening the social fabric”.

Now, whether or not you think Krishnan draws a long bow in directly linking Trump’s declamations with that of Radio Mille Collines — the Rwandan radio station that incited ethnic hatred and directed killings during the 1994 genocide — I would suggest that for those interested in international cooperation her piece merits reading. Not least because her conclusion perhaps points to some possible ways forward for a sector that is currently struggling to make sense of its role in a volatile and complex moment.

The capacity to read what is happening exists. It lives in Warsaw and Sarajevo and Kigali and Phnom Penh and Kabul and across the subcontinent and in the communities around us whose history required them to develop it as a condition of survival.

In particular, she points out that Pakistan’s ability to understand the threat beneath the words meant that it was looking to mediate an off-ramp from the Iran war whilst Western leaders were trying to read the Trumpian tea leaves. As Megan Davis has similarly indicated for those of us in Australia, the Indigenous experience of the First Nations Dialogues and the Voice to Parliament proposal provides an important body of knowledge on not only the early warning signals of rhetorical assault, but what democratic renewal might look like in the face of it. As Yuen Yuen Ang posits, being open to this diagnosis “from the margins” can also provide a better historical understanding of the unequal nature of international development and what she calls “the industrial-colonial paradigm” upon which it is based.

However, if the practical wisdom of those on the front line of hate speech and discrimination is to genuinely inform collective action, then this will require more genuine forms of cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, a more respectful exploration of different ways of knowing and being, and crucially revised notions of accountability. This might include starting to explore, as Yuen Yuen Ang has proposed, how what is described as a “polycrisis” by some might also be seen as a “polytunity” by others. By this Ang means that moments when multiple, interlocking crises converge also open up rare windows for systemic reinvention — opportunities to remake institutions, relationships and paradigms that would otherwise remain locked in place. And in particular to overturn the historical hierarchy of international development where “The West set standards, and the Rest followed“.

For the development sector, building the civic skills required to come to terms with the current reality, moving past the disorientation, conferences and exhaustion, and discerning what might be done in response is an urgent task. This is therefore not a call for further reflection or navel-gazing; rather, it is a recognition of the vital importance of listening to, learning from and building accountable relationships with those best placed to shape responses to the current moment.

About the author/s

Chris Roche
Chris Roche is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Human Security and Social Change at La Trobe University.

In December 2025, PNG’s acting communication minister announced an early Christmas gift for the country: three new undersea cables to be delivered not by Santa’s sleigh but as part of the Pukpuk Connectivity Initiative, an undertaking that sits within the broader bilateral context of the Pukpuk Treaty with Australia.

PNG already has three cables enabling internet connectivity: the Pipe Pacific Cable 1 from Guam, which landed in Madang in 2009; the Pukpuk1 cable from Jayapura, Indonesia, which connected Vanimo in 2020; and the Coral Sea Cable from Sydney to Port Moresby, which was officially launched in December 2019.

The Coral Sea Cable launch provided the initial impetus for our research into the pricing of mobile internet services for consumers in PNG. The research commenced in the first week of 2020 (see data note 1 below for an explanation of the weekly data collection method). This blog reports on mobile internet prices during the 2025 calendar year (see data note 2 below for exact reporting dates).

Digicel’s internet prices were monitored every Monday in 2025. Prices fluctuated early in the year, remained constant for several months and then changed slightly again in mid-2025. Figure 1 shows the mobile internet prices offered by Digicel during 2025.

Figure 1: One-day, three-day, seven-day and 30-day plans offered by Digicel in 2025 (toea per megabyte)

Source: Research team.

Digicel’s data bundle prices were unstable and unpredictable throughout the year. With strong network coverage and a widespread customer base, Digicel is a top player in the industry. However, users have no way of predicting when Digicel will change its prices or whether the service will remain affordable when it does. Keeping track of these fluctuations is vital, as it enables further discussion and improvement in the industry.

By contrast, there were no changes in Telikom’s data bundle prices throughout 2025. The one-day, three-day, seven-day and 30-day bundles all remained the same. While this stability is helpful for customers planning expenditure, it also means there were no improvements in affordability during the year. (Temporary promotions could have been offered in 2025 on days of the week other than Monday, thus eluding our data collection.)

Vodafone PNG also maintained consistent pricing for its one-day, three-day, seven-day and 30-day data bundles from January to December 2025, with no adjustments recorded during this interval. In January 2026, the company expanded its product portfolio by introducing a series of mid-range data bundles priced at K10 for 6GB (valid for five days), K20 for 12GB (valid for 10 days) and K25 for 15GB (valid for 14 days).

The introduction of the mid-range bundles coincided with the discontinuation of Vodafone’s previously popular “double data” promotion, which had offered customers twice the purchased data from Thursday to Saturday each week. This promotion formally ended on 31 December 2025, a change that prompted numerous customer queries and complaints on social media, including comments posted to the company’s official Facebook page. Vodafone retained its overnight promotion of 1GB for K1 (running from 10pm to 6am daily) and its “supa Sunday” promotion, which provides 2GB of data for K2 for use by midnight on Sunday. The in-demand “double data” promotion was re-introduced in mid-April 2026.

In summary, mobile internet prices generally remained stable in PNG during 2025, although Digicel customers experienced fluctuations and unpredictability. Digicel’s pricing shifts affect the national picture, given the company’s size as a market actor. In some populated parts of PNG, Digicel is the only network available, leaving customers in such locations with limited choice.

While there is evidence that prices declined in 2019 and again when Vodafone entered the market, there were no notable changes in 2025. Digicel prices fluctuated but the other two providers kept their data bundle prices steady. The continued stability across Telikom and Vodafone suggests that competitive pressure did not intensify in 2025, and may indicate that the PNG mobile data market has entered a stabilisation phase following the disruption caused by Vodafone’s entry in 2022.

Starlink’s satellite internet service has now been issued a licence to operate in PNG. A court judgement handed down on 24 April 2026 at the PNG National Court cleared the way for the licensing process to progress. Prior to these developments, the regulator had stated that Starlink’s use in PNG was illegal, while businesses, bureaucrats and prominent citizens called for Starlink access.

In the first quarter of 2026, the regulator in PNG approved trials of OneWeb’s satellite communication services by four companies. Like Starlink, OneWeb operates a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites. Starlink has far more satellites in orbit than any other company and offers direct-to-consumer services, whereas OneWeb is concentrated on offering services to businesses and telecommunication providers.

Our team will continue to monitor prices. If the three new undersea cables go ahead, we will attempt to ascertain whether they have any impact on retail internet pricing. We will also observe developments regarding satellite communications and their possible effects on prices.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the ongoing contributions of Moses Sakai to the project.

Data note 1: Between 2020 and 2022, mobile internet prices were monitored for Digicel, Telikom and bmobile as separate mobile network operators (MNOs) in PNG. However, Telikom and bmobile were treated as a single retail entity (as PNG Telikom Ltd) in the data collection effort following their merger in 2021. Vodafone entered the PNG telecommunication market in mid-2022. Although the three MNOs (Digicel, Telikom and Vodafone) provide a range of internet packages for various periods of time, this research has focused on monitoring the data bundles offered by the three MNOs for 1, 3, 7 and 30 days. The data collection does not cover the internet prices offered through the three MNOs’ “combo” products. Data entry for each of the three MNOs’ products is done every Monday, and prices are obtained by typing the code “*777#” on our mobile devices. While Telikom and Vodafone only use “*777#”, Digicel users type “*777#” for internet bundles and “*675#” for other Digicel products. All previous updates are available here.

Data note 2: The last update reported on data up to and including Monday 11 November 2024. This update includes data from Monday 18 November 2024 to Monday 29 December 2025 inclusive.

Disclosure

This research was supported by the Pacific Research Program, with funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views are those of the authors only.

About the author/s

Amanda H A Watson
Dr Amanda H A Watson is a researcher with the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. Her research interests include information and communication technologies in the Pacific Islands region and the role of the media sector in Pacific Island countries.

Hafford Norea
Hafford Norea is a Research Officer with the Education Research Program at the Papua New Guinea National Research Institute. He previously worked with the PNG Public Employees Association from 2020-2023.

Loretta Dilu
Loretta Dilu is a lecturer in the Strategic Management Division in the School of Business and Public Policy at the University of Papua New Guinea. Loretta was a recipient of the Master of Economics and Public Policy Scholarship through the ANU-UPNG Partnership.

Jonathan Zureo
Jonathan Zureo is a Lecturer at the Divine Word University, Papua New Guinea. He teaches data communications and cyber security in the Information Systems Department and the Mathematics and Computing Science Department. His research interests lie in the cyber security domain of PNG and the Pacific.

This good news is a headline finding from Vanuatu’s Second National Survey on Women’s Lives and Family Relationships. The study was undertaken by the Vanuatu Women’s Centre (VWC) in 2024 in partnership with the Vanuatu Bureau of Statistics (VBoS) and was launched on 9 March 2026. It compares findings with the first Vanuatu national survey, which was undertaken in 2009.

The global prevalence of physical and/or sexual partner violence has reduced by 0.2 percentage points annually, for both lifetime and current prevalence. For Vanuatu, the lifetime annual reduction in prevalence is also 0.2 percentage points. However, the pace of change for current prevalence (in the 12 months before each survey) is faster in Vanuatu at 0.6 percentage points annually.

Although Vanuatu’s reduction in the prevalence of intimate partner violence is undoubtedly still too slow at less than one percentage point per year, it is nevertheless a welcome finding, indicating that the prevention and response strategies of the Vanuatu Women’s Centre in collaboration with the Vanuatu Government, provincial governments, chiefs and other stakeholders are having an impact, as demonstrated in the research report.

Like other autonomous and locally led Pacific women’s organisations such as the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre, VWC has consistently implemented — over more than 30 years — the strategies that various evidence-based reviews (for example, Htun and Weldon, the WHO, Garcia-Moreno et al. and a further WHO review) conclude are essential for reducing prevalence. These key strategies include: a survivor-centred and comprehensive approach to responding to women and girls subjected to violence; community mobilisation and group education with women and men to change harmful social norms; national legal advocacy to improve accountability coupled with client-based advocacy; and persistent long-term efforts in collaboration with other national and provincial Vanuatu agencies and community leaders to strengthen prevention and response efforts across the country at all institutional levels.

Inevitably, comparisons of prevalence rates between (and within) countries present methodological challenges. One of these challenges was addressed by the fact that the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) provided funding which enabled VWC to use the same methodology that was used in 2009. Both the 2009 and 2024 surveys used the World Health Organization (WHO) survey tool (adapted to the Vanuatu context), rather than a small module in a larger survey focused on a range of other social issues. This methodological choice significantly enhances the reliability and validity of comparative findings.

Another recent study compared changes in prevalence in several South and Southeast Asian countries where comparable methods of data collection were available across different points in time. Comparing the changes in Vanuatu since 2009 with the findings of this study provides further confidence in the conclusion that the pace of change in Vanuatu compares positively with other countries (Figure 2). However, it should be noted that Vanuatu and Melanesian countries in general have some of the highest prevalence rates in the world, and thus are starting from very high baselines compared to most countries, and that there are currently no other published studies across more than one data point for comparison within the Pacific region.

Despite the good progress made, data from the 2024 survey reveals a complex picture of progress, with emotional intimate partner violence (in the last 12 months) reducing by only three percentage points since 2009. The prevalence of coercive control remains extraordinarily high, with 59% of women currently facing this form of abuse from husbands or partners.

Data on non-partner violence, and particularly childhood and adult sexual abuse, are confronting. These abuses put women at significantly greater risk of living with violence in their adult intimate relationships, and underscore the challenges ahead: 21% of women have been sexually abused by non-partners in their lifetimes, including attempted rape and unwanted touching; and 30% of girls were sexually abused under the age of 15.

VWC pioneered the incorporation of several new areas of study into the 2024 survey: it was the first using the WHO methodology to incorporate questions into the survey tool on violence against women during disasters / emergencies, technology-facilitated abuse (by both partners and non-partners), and sexual harassment. It is also the only country survey (to our knowledge) to assess the extent to which intimate partner violence causes permanent disabilities among women. The incorporation of each of these issues into the survey tool came from the grassroots: they were informed by VWC’s day-to-day counselling, training, legal advocacy and prevention work across the nation.

Without ongoing core support from both DFAT and the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, it would not have been possible to incorporate these new areas of research, to confidently compare prevalence rates over 15 years, or to achieve the good progress made to date.

Nevertheless, the findings require an urgent and renewed commitment to action by all stakeholders — to continue the investment in evidence-based strategies, and to accelerate and sustain the changes already made.

Disclosure

The survey was supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

About the author/s

Tatavola Matas
Tatavola Matas is the Coordinator of the Vanuatu Women's Centre in Port Vila.

Sharon Frank
Sharon Frank is Program Manager of the Vanuatu Women's Centre in Port Vila.

Juliet Hunt
Juliet Hunt is an independent gender equality consultant focusing on research, training, mentoring, project design, monitoring and evaluation.

A central message of our research is that institutions are not neutral containers of governance. They create incentives. And in fragile or politically complex contexts, those incentives can just as easily produce conflict as cooperation.

A common starting point in development policy is that strengthening institutions — for example, civil service commissions or administrative rules — may improve governance outcomes. Our findings suggest that this view is incomplete.

Institutions are always embedded in historical, political and social contexts. In Afghanistan, attempts to build a modern, merit-based bureaucracy after 2001 were shaped by deep distrust among political actors and a legacy of highly centralised rule. In PNG, inherited Westminster-style institutions have interacted with local norms such as wantokism and “big-man” politics.

In both cases, informal networks — of patronage, kinship and political loyalty — have often had greater influence than formal rules. This means that institutional reforms, even when technically sound, do not operate as intended unless they align with underlying incentives.

One of our key findings is that institutional design can inadvertently create incentives for rivalry and conflict.

In Afghanistan, the post-2001 settlement accorded priority to short-term stability by distributing ministries and senior positions among political factions. While this helped accommodate powerful actors, it also created overlapping mandates, duplication and competition across institutions. Government departments became arenas of rivalry rather than coordination.

This situation resulted in low stability in key institutions, where a turnover in leadership would also lead to the replacement of heads of key departments. For instance, even the Finance Ministry, which was relatively meritocratic and governed by civil service constraints, experienced changes in over 50% of its senior positions under each minister from 2009 to 2021.

Excessive centralisation further reinforced these dynamics. With authority and resources concentrated in Kabul, control of the state became highly valuable, increasing the stakes of political competition. In a low-trust environment, this encouraged actors to compete aggressively for control rather than cooperate. Following the disputed 2014 presidential election, a power-sharing National Unity Government was formed, with the two rival candidates becoming President and Chief Executive. Although intended to promote unity and stability, the arrangement soon became vulnerable to internal power struggles, as competition over key decisions and senior appointments weakened the government and civil service.

PNG presents a different configuration of similar challenges. Decentralisation post-1975 independence created multiple layers of government, but with blurred responsibilities. The reversal of some of these reforms at later stages, such as the abolition of provincial elected assemblies in 1995, undermined rather than empowered local administration. The establishment of the District Services Improvement Program (DSIP), which gave Open MPs significant influence over the distribution of funds, arguably institutionalised a form of political patronage and weakened local administrations.

Amid weak institutional capacity, overlapping roles across national, provincial and local levels have often led to weak coordination and delays in service delivery. Low ministerial stability, due to persistent political instability, has reinforced these problems.

These examples illustrate a broader issue: institutional arrangements that appear rational in design can produce counterproductive outcomes if they generate the wrong incentives.

In both Afghanistan and PNG, patronage and clientelism have played a central role in shaping institutional dynamics.

In Afghanistan, the allocation of public office frequently reflected political bargaining rather than merit. Ministries and senior positions were treated as resources to be used to reward allies and maintain coalitions. This contributed to high turnover in leadership, instability within institutions and weakened administrative capacity.

In PNG, patronage operates through both political and administrative channels. Appointments are often influenced by political, regional or kinship ties, and public resources can be used to build electoral support. These dynamics encourage cooperation within networks but limit cooperation across them, while also fostering destructive forms of competition.

Importantly, these patterns are not merely inherited from the past; they are reinforced by contemporary institutional arrangements. In PNG, funding mechanisms such as the DSIP have expanded the discretionary control of MPs, while in Afghanistan, senior appointment processes shaped by the post-Bonn Agreement (2001) political settlement embedded patronage within state institutions.

Both countries have witnessed substantial reform efforts. In Afghanistan, civil service reforms supported by international partners helped create pockets of professionalism or “islands of efficiency“, particularly in some ministries. A new cohort of educated officials improved administrative capacity in specific areas.

Similarly, PNG has implemented multiple waves of reform, including decentralisation and public sector restructuring, including for example the creation of sometimes-effective Provincial Health Authorities.

However, in both contexts, these efforts have had uneven and often limited impacts. Reforms have tended to produce the above-mentioned islands of efficiency rather than system-wide change. Where underlying political incentives remain unchanged, reforms are vulnerable to being undermined or co-opted.

Our analysis suggests three practical implications.

First, institutional design must focus on incentives, not just structures. It is critical to consider how actors are likely to respond to new arrangements in practice.

Second, reforms need to be grounded in context. Imported models — whether centralised or decentralised — may not work as intended if they are not aligned with local political realities.

Third, addressing patronage and political competition is essential. Without engaging with these dynamics, institutional reforms are unlikely to achieve sustained improvements in governance.

The experiences of Afghanistan and PNG highlight a fundamental challenge: building effective, impartial state institutions is not simply a technical task. It is deeply political.

While the goal of a professional, neutral civil service remains important, achieving it requires more than formal institutional design. It demands careful attention to the incentives created by institutions and to the broader environment in which they operate.

As we argue in our paper, without such attention, institutional reforms risk reinforcing the very patterns of negative competition and conflict they are intended to overcome.

Download the full discussion paper from the Development Policy Centre website.

Disclosure

This research was undertaken with the support of the ANU-UPNG Partnership, an initiative of the PNG-Australia Partnership, funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views expressed are those of the authors only.

About the author/s

Nemat Bizhan
Nematullah Bizhan is a senior lecturer at the Development Policy Centre. He leds the Centre's partnership with the University of Papua New Guinea.

William Maley
Emeritus Professor William Maley served as Professor of Diplomacy at the Australian National University from 2003-2021, and was Foundation Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy from 2003-2014.

In my research into the seasonal worker program over more than a decade, I have become only too aware of its complexity. The starting point for any analysis is to recognise that the PALM scheme is not an aid program, where the donor through a managing contractor micromanages the program’s inputs and outputs. In contrast, the employers, both growers and labour hire firms, are in the driving seat in a real sense. They individually are the source of the demand for workers. Employers want and need to have the final say on who is employed.

How workers are vetted, selected and recruited is a key element of the formal bilateral agreement between two sovereign countries. This agreement is backed up in Australia’s case by an approved employer Deed of Agreement and a detailed set of guidelines. The latter have gone through 11 revisions since 26 June 2023, and now number 166 pages. These revisions have made the PALM scheme increasingly more regulated and inflexible in how it operates, especially for employers in agriculture.

Since June 2023, the number of short-term PALM workers in agriculture has fallen from 19,370 to 14,990 in March 2026. This is a loss of 4,380 workers, or 23%.

In addition, regular reports of worker difficulties have been prominent in the media, especially the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, SBS News and The Guardian. This reporting is almost always one-sided, with employers not canvassed for their understanding of the situation. The result is a low-trust environment for the employers, labour hire firms and at least some of the workers.

From the beginning of the seasonal worker program, employers developed their own informal system to introduce a higher level of trust into how workers are selected and assessed. This high-trust system involves employers relying on return workers each year. These workers are invited to return because they are more productive and are happy with the work and living arrangements.

However, the Timorese government has built its own instability into the PALM program in three ways. First, this is done by controlling who is selected for a shortlist presented to an employer. The labour department insists employers select all new workers from the department’s own labour pool. This forces employers to take another round of untested new workers with the lack of skills and understanding of what to expect that they bring with them. Requiring the employer to use the department’s own shortlist also creates a high risk of corruption in the form of staff demanding payment. This was confirmed by an ABC video media report in April 2026, in which the head of the labour department acknowledged that a member of his staff had demanded and received a bribe.

The second source of instability is that the Timorese labour department has posted two Timorese civil servants to Darwin to be country liaison officers. These officials are not only in a location where there are few Timorese workers (in March 2026 there were 240 in the Northern Territory, 4.7% of the 5,115 Timorese PALM workers in Australia). These civil servants are from Dili and therefore have little understanding of Australian society. The feedback from various sources is that they are missing in action. In contrast, other sending countries such as Fiji have country liaison officers from their diaspora who are Australian residents. They reside in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Guildford, NSW. This means they are located within a reasonable travelling time to where their countries’ workers are.

The third source of instability generated by the Timorese government is the pressure on the embassy, and the ambassador in particular, to fill the gap. This requires that the ambassador spend her valuable time visiting workers in remote locations and reporting back to meetings with government agencies in Canberra. The problems identified are not addressed at the workplace but become the basis for formal complaints at a high diplomatic level.

In addition to resolving problems at workplace level, meetings at bilateral government-to-government level are also needed. A mechanism is required to note problems which go beyond a specific workplace. Its task should be to devise solutions, trial them, report back and, where successful, scale up. The existing officials are not suited to do this, as they are too limited by what they perceive to be their mandates. This applies to both the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and the embassies and high commissions of the sending countries.

What is needed are high-level (that is, ministerial) bilateral discussions held on a regular basis (say every six months) between an Australian government minister or parliamentary secretary with each of the four major sending countries. These discussions should also include other key players, especially employer and labour hire representatives. These meetings need to be organised so that they are problem-solving exercises, accountable to senior government ministers.

4/6 Correction: in March 2026 there were 240 workers in the Northern Territory, 4.7% of 5,115 Timorese PALM workers in Australia.

This is a lightly edited version of an article first published in The Australian.

Read the author’s recent journal article “Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program: Working Out Ways to Manage Risk”.

About the author/s

Richard Curtain
Dr Richard Curtain is a research associate, and a former research fellow, with the Development Policy Centre. He is an expert on Pacific labour markets and migration.

The findings summarised in this post are drawn from a critical review of PNG’s tertiary education system since 1975 that we presented at the 2025 PNG Update conference. The review used the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) for the tertiary sector to benchmark PNG against other countries in the region and around the world. It had three objectives: to assess the historical development and current state of tertiary education in PNG from 1975 to 2025, to evaluate the effectiveness of public and private tertiary institutions in meeting national development goals and to identify key challenges and propose strategic recommendations for the sector.

The University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) is the country’s first university and was founded in 1965. In that same year, the PNG Institute of Higher Technical Education was established in Port Moresby. In 1967, the institute moved to Lae, Morobe province, and in 1970 was renamed the PNG Institute of Technology. It was officially upgraded to the PNG University of Technology (Unitech) in 1973. By the mid-1980s, the country still had only two universities, with tertiary access concentrated in urban centres, and education was largely state-driven.

The period between 1990 and 2000 was an era of expansion and diversification, during which faith-based (private) tertiary institutions gained formal recognition. Divine Word University (DWU) and Pacific Adventist University (PAU) both attained university status in 1996. They had existed in other forms since the early 1980s.

By the early 2000s, PNG’s public tertiary network had expanded to four main universities: UPNG, PNG Unitech, the University of Goroka (UOG) and the University of Natural Resources and Environment (UNRE).

From 2010 to 2020, major governance reforms transformed the sector, notably the passage of the Higher Education (General Provisions) Act 2014, which created the Department of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology (DHERST).

In 2014, the Institute of Business Studies (IBS) submitted a proposal to become a university under the Act, and in late 2016 IBSUniversity was formed. The Lutheran University of Papua New Guinea (LUPNG), a faith-based institution, was created in 2022. It was created as a merger of three existing Lutheran institutions: Balob Teachers College in Lae, Martin Luther Seminary in Lae and the Madang Lutheran School of Nursing. It started enrolling students in 2023. The Innovative University of Enga (IUE) was formally established under the IUE Act 2022 and welcomed its first intake in 2024 with over 860 students in 2024 and graduated 166 students in 2025.

There are currently 10 higher educational universities — six public institutions, three faith-based institutions and one private university — plus over 100 technical and vocational colleges. In 2024, more than 30,000 Grade 12 school leaver applicants and about 2,268 non-school leavers competed for places, yet only around 11,500 secured tertiary placements for studies in 2025, leaving over half without access to formal post-secondary pathways.

By 2025, the number increased with more than 38,000 grade 12 students sitting final exams. Interestingly, the results of a national online selection process reported that over 23,000 students had been selected to study in different tertiary institutions in 2026 — an impressive increase of more than 11,000 compared with 2024. This is due to the increase in the number of tertiary institutions, institutional reforms, improvements in the higher education online selection system and the expansion of quotas for each program offered in each institution.

Despite decades of transition, enrolment capacity remains low and regional disparities persist in access to tertiary education. PNG’s GER for the tertiary sector remains lower than that of other comparable lower-middle income economies around the world. PNG’s GER has been fluctuating at a much lower rate between 2% and 2.8% since 1999, which is far lower than that of the Philippines (47%), Morocco (48%) and Nicaragua (30%), and relatively closer to Eritrea (3%), if higher than Haiti (1%). In the region, PNG’s GER is extremely low, while Australia hits the target of universal education for all. Fiji, Tonga, Indonesia and Malaysia are also doing well, with GERs above average.

Since 1975, the tertiary-age population has increased as the country’s population has grown. However, GER is progressing at a slow pace. To understand why PNG’s GER fluctuates, it is important to visualise how it is calculated. GER is calculated as the total number of enrolments divided by the tertiary-age population. Even when the total number of enrolments goes up, if the population grows even faster, the GER will actually go down.

This is exactly what we see between 1995 and 2015. While the education system is expanding, it is not expanding at the same speed as the youth bulge in the population. Demand for higher education is growing much faster than the available seats and infrastructure. PNG remains an outlier in the Pacific, with extremely low tertiary participation. Clearly there is a mismatch between national aspirations and educational capacity, given the youth population bulge and demand for higher education. The pressure is even greater now with the no age limit policy for non-school-leavers.

Public and private tertiary institutions demonstrate clear differences in how they accord priorities to their various goals and measure success. Public institutions, which are state-owned and government-funded, ensure extensive national coverage and high levels of affordability and access, particularly benefiting rural communities. However, they often demonstrate only moderate relevance of programs and graduate employability, alongside lower research output due to limitations in funding and resources.

Private institutions, by contrast, are generally fee-based and predominantly urban-oriented, and they provide more market-relevant programs and stronger graduate employability, facilitated by adaptable curricula and closer ties to industry. Nonetheless, their reach is more restricted and access is limited by financial constraints, resulting in moderate to low national coverage.

While public institutions consistently contribute to national policy objectives through centralised systems, the contributions of private institutions are increasing but remain fragmented due to their varied ownership and operational structures.

Despite improvements in some areas, key challenges persist. The rural-urban divide means education is limited to certain parts of PNG, where there is a gendered imbalance in access and low-quality, outdated curricula. Weak governance, poor infrastructure and graduate unemployment also hinder the system’s capacity to provide inclusive, relevant and high-quality education aligned with national development requirements.

Consequently, comprehensive strategies should give priority to the expansion of scholarships and inclusive policies to enhance access, while also utilising digital and distance learning models like the PNG National Open University. At the same time, curriculum reform must be guided by industry demands and bolstered by skills audits, internships and stronger employer engagement to improve graduate employability.

Governance and institutional performance can be strengthened through regular policy and performance audits, leadership development and merit-based appointments. Addressing infrastructure deficiencies will require coordinated investment through public-private partnership models and donor support, along with the implementation of e-learning platforms and self-financing initiatives to ensure sustainability.

Tertiary education is the foundation of PNG’s human development and national progress. A holistic approach is needed to put in place bold reforms, inclusive strategies and a commitment to excellence in the sector for the next 50 years and beyond.

Disclosure

This research was undertaken with the support of the ANU-UPNG Partnership, an initiative of the PNG-Australia Partnership, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views are those of the authors only.

About the author/s

Ponnusamy Manohar
Dr Ponnusamy Manohar serves as the Deputy Executive Dean of the SBPP and is Associate Professor in business management at the UPNG. His research focuses on the quality of higher education, socioeconomic development, and management.

David Mo
David Mo is the Head of the Business Management Division at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Loretta Dilu
Loretta Dilu is a lecturer in the Strategic Management Division in the School of Business and Public Policy at the University of Papua New Guinea. Loretta was a recipient of the Master of Economics and Public Policy Scholarship through the ANU-UPNG Partnership.

On the surface, the bill fills a genuine gap: Fiji has never held a constitutional referendum, and no legal framework existed to govern one. The government’s stated intention is to ensure any future referendum is conducted with integrity and impartiality.

But the bill’s specific provisions have drawn sharp criticism from civil society organisations, legal experts, opposition parties and Fiji’s own former chief legal advisor, all of whom argue that the restrictions go far beyond ensuring orderly conduct and risk producing a referendum in which the government controls the flow of information while ordinary Fijians are prohibited from campaigning.

Why this matters now: with a general election due between August 2026 and February 2027, and the government committed to constitutional reform before going to the polls, the rules established by this bill will directly shape whether any resulting constitutional changes carry democratic legitimacy — or simply the appearance of it.

The 2013 Constitution, introduced by then-Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama following the 2006 coup, was designed to be nearly impossible to change. Section 160 required a three-quarters majority vote in parliament, followed by a referendum passed by three-quarters of all registered voters. Not three-quarters of those who turned out: three-quarters of all registered voters in Fiji.

To understand how high that bar was: in the 2022 election, there were 693,915 registered voters, but voter turnout was 68.3%. Even if every person who voted in 2022 had voted yes in a referendum, it would not have been enough to pass a constitutional amendment.

The Rabuka government, which came to power in December 2022 on a platform that included constitutional reform, attempted to change this in March 2025, proposing a bill that would have reduced the parliamentary bar from three-quarters to two-thirds and replaced the registered-voter threshold with a standard majority of valid votes cast. That bill received 40 votes, short of the three-quarters supermajority required under Section 160.

In August 2025, the Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion that narrowed the amendment threshold, ruling that an amendment could proceed with a two-thirds parliamentary majority followed by a simple majority in a referendum. That opinion cleared the path for constitutional change, and the National Referendum Bill is the government’s attempt to lay the foundations.

Several provisions have attracted the highest level of concern from critics. Section 22 bans the creation or distribution of any campaign materials during the referendum period, while Section 23 prohibits doorstep canvassing — the primary method of grassroots organising in rural and maritime Fiji. Clause 11 compounds these restrictions by requiring the referendum question to be published only five days before polling.

Other clauses have drawn significant, if less acute, concern. Clause 24 permits parliamentary parties near polling stations but excludes civil society. Clause 25 makes gatherings of five or more people unlawful if they cause “intimidation, alarm or annoyance”, with penalties of up to one year in prison.

The criticism of this bill is not coming from a single partisan source. It spans Fiji’s legal profession, civil society sector and opposition parties.

The Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS) told the Standing Committee that the bill was “significantly weak” on core democratic principles and may contravene international standards for free suffrage. FCOSS executive director Vani Catanasiga described the near-total ban on political campaigning in Clauses 22 and 23 as a “major concern” that “directly contradicts the international principle of freedom of expression”. She also compared the bill’s five-day notice period for the referendum question to the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum, where voters had seven months for public discussion before polling day.

The Fiji Labour Party’s representative before the committee, Dr Sunil Kumar, called the bill “unconstitutional and undemocratic”, arguing that it criminalises normal campaigning and violates freedom of speech, expression, assembly and association. He noted that democracies including Australia, Canada, Scotland, Ireland and New Zealand actively encourage campaigning during referendums.

The Fiji Women’s Rights Movement described the measures as “draconian and capable of silencing large groups of under-represented people”, specifically flagging the impact on women, youth and marginalised communities who rely on grassroots organising and community discussion to participate in political life.

Perhaps most significantly, Fiji’s former Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum told the Standing Committee that the bill, as drafted, is antithetical to its stated objective of giving the Fijian people a voice.

Acting Attorney-General Siromi Turaga told parliament the clauses “are intended solely to ensure the orderly, transparent and impartial conduct of referendums”. The government argues the bill fills a genuine legal gap and that its provisions mirror the blackout periods used in democratic elections around the world. It has not publicly responded in detail to the specific criticisms of Clause 25’s “annoyance” standard or the five-day notice period.

At the heart of this debate is a question that goes beyond the specific clauses: if constitutional change is achieved through a process in which ordinary Fijians were legally prevented from campaigning, discussing or organising around the question, and in which only the government had an unrestricted platform, would the result carry genuine democratic legitimacy?

Comparative experience suggests that referendum legitimacy depends heavily on the quality of public deliberation before the vote, not just the procedural conduct of voting day itself. A referendum conducted in silence is not the same as a referendum conducted with informed consent.

The Standing Committee concluded its public hearings in early 2026, and its report is expected before parliament debates the bill. Whether its recommendations require substantive amendments, particularly to Clauses 22, 23 and 25, will be one of the most important indicators of whether the Rabuka government’s commitment to constitutional reform extends to the process, not just the outcome.

This is an edited version of an article first published in the Fiji Political Review.

About the author/s

Lanieta Tukana
Lanieta Tukana is the founding editor of the Fiji Political Review. She writes on Fijian politics, constitutional reform and democratic governance.

Under the framework of the Joint Declaration on Economic Security Cooperation, the leaders also pledged to support Pacific Island countries (PICs) to combat money laundering through capacity-building initiatives. This should be seen by PICs as a positive development, as the crime remains one of the key challenges in the region.

However, climate change, which is recognised by the Pacific’s small island states as their single largest security threat, was not on the agenda. The implicit identification of China as a threat to regional stability will displease some Pacific Island nations and perhaps encourage others. In all, however, strengthening Australia-Japan ties is overwhelmingly positive for a disparate region.

Multilateralism is central to the diplomatic and economic functioning of the island nations. In light of the US’s repudiation of international institutions and China’s increasingly aggressive acts, its decline is cause for alarm. North Korean missiles flying over Japan and Chinese aircraft buzzing foreign planes may feel far from, say, Port Moresby. But Pacific island governments notice, register and are planning for this more disputatious era.

Chinese influence in the Pacific Island countries is well documented; its economic and security cooperation initiatives in the region have surged in recent decades. Solomon Islands is closely aligned with China. Kiribati has welcomed Chinese funding for airstrip upgrades, seen by some analysts as evidence of grey-zone military tactics. Luganville Wharf on Vanuatu may soon serve a similar “dual-use” purpose — for Chinese commercial and military vessels alike.

The Australian government is well aware of these investments (or encroachments, depending on who you ask). For its part, Japan’s Takaichi government is pushing itself to step up across the islands, adding hard capabilities to its energetic diplomatic efforts.

In February this year, Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi welcomed 28 countries to Tokyo for the third Japan-Pacific Islands Defense Dialogue. Agreements were made with Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Fiji covering maritime security and disaster relief. Koizumi has been clear that the global and regional security environment is deteriorating and that Japan is sharpening its military capabilities and partnerships in response.

Under Koizumi, Japan’s defence budget will now exceed 9 trillion yen (around A$90 billion), closing in on the 2% of GDP target well ahead of schedule. Self-defence is the priority, but self-defence will come, in part, in the form of stronger alliances across the Indo-Pacific.

Koizumi’s call for the “autonomy” of the Pacific island countries aligns with this approach and serves as a clear rebuke to China. Japan’s alternative pitch is the preservation of national sovereignty with Tokyo serving as a long-term security partner. This is the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) way, as it were. Now in its tenth year but updated for the current circumstances, Japan’s FOIP vision is based on freedom of navigation and trade, and the preservation of national sovereignty.

The Albanese government has faced diplomatic setbacks in the Pacific islands, not least the failure of a security and climate pact with Vanuatu in 2025. (A revised version of the Nakamal Agreement was approved by Vanuatu’s cabinet in May 2026, but only after explicit language limiting China’s security and investment role in the country was stripped out.) Australia is sometimes seen as “other” on the islands or too close a partner of the United States. Japan’s renewed focus on the islands, therefore, will be welcome.

As Japan-Australia collaboration on global challenges intensifies, this will have positive knock-on effects on Pacific security.

For example, on 18 April, Australia signed contracts for eleven of Japan’s Mogami-class frigates in a deal worth A$10 billion (US$7 billion). This acquisition will bolster the Royal Australian Navy. The frigates, to be built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, will have a range of up to 10,000 nautical miles — a gamechanger for Australia’s efforts to protect the Pacific islands’ maritime sovereignty.

The deal was followed by Prime Minister Takaichi’s overhauling of defence export regulations. Now, Japan’s firms will be able to sell lethal weaponry to countries with which it holds Defense Equipment and Technology Transfer Agreements, including Australia and New Zealand. Increased exports and improved interoperability with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces will be a plus for regional security and stability.

In tandem with defence export reform, Japan’s Official Security Assistance (OSA) budget for 2026 has been doubled to 18.1 billion yen (A$175 million). PNG and Tonga were named priority recipients for the 2025-2026 period. Dual-use assets for disaster response and maritime infrastructure building have already been provided to PNG.

Australian policy in the Pacific island countries has tended to focus on economic support. A record A$2.2 billion worth of Official Development Assistance (ODA) was committed to the Pacific in the 2026-2027 budget. Climate funding has been generous for some island nations. But tools to preserve national sovereignty have been constabulary and maritime policing-oriented. For example, Australia’s Pacific Maritime Security Program, under which 12 Pacific island countries plus Timor-Leste have been gifted Guardian-class patrol boats, is a notable success. In terms of hardware, Japan is now well placed to add lethal weapons to the foundations of regional security.

Pacific island countries are too small — economically, militarily and diplomatically, with very limited resources and capacity — to explicitly take sides in the superpower rivalry. They should be cautious about middle power alignment too. That said, external interests that act in good faith to preserve, not erode, national sovereignty should be welcomed. To that end, Australian economic aid and Japan’s more defence-edged approach are opportunities to be exploited.

The concept of rowing between the reefs — finding a path through choppy geopolitical waters without cleaving to one side of a conflict — has become somewhat of a cliché in international affairs. But it is surely the best way for Pacific island countries to preserve national sovereignty and secure prosperity in an era of escalating confrontation.

About the author/s

Moses Sakai
Moses Sakai is Resident Vasey Fellow at the Pacific Forum, a foreign policy think tank based in Hawai’i. He was previously a Research Fellow at PNG National Research Institute and a visiting scholar on US foreign policy at the University of Delaware.

The Quad’s latest Fiji port announcement is being sold as development assistance. But to many in the Pacific it looks uncomfortably familiar: distant powers gathering behind closed doors, shaping regional futures and expecting island nations to accept decisions already made elsewhere.

Like a diplomatic masonic lodge, “the Quad” — Australia, India, Japan and the United States — gathered its foreign ministers in New Delhi this week and calmly made decisions concerning another nation, Fiji, which was neither represented at the meeting nor, days later, entirely clear on what had been decided in its name.

The 26 May Delhi meeting carries an uncomfortable echo of the 1889 Berlin Conference, where Germany, Britain and the United States deliberated over the fate of Samoa without a single Samoan in the room. Fiji, likewise, was absent from the Quad’s table.

The age of empire may officially be over, but for South Pacific states the pattern remains stubbornly familiar: distant powers still confer, strategise and decide their futures with little consultation, and even less representation. Increasingly it looks as if Australia has acquired a sense of ownership over the region.

Making decisions for the Pacific were Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Japan’s Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

They announced several concrete decisions directly affecting Fiji and the wider South Pacific — none of which involved Pacific representation. The Quad unveiled its first-ever joint infrastructure project, a new port in Fiji, aimed at addressing insufficient port capacity across Pacific Island nations. The project is framed as a demonstration of “high-quality, resilient infrastructure” delivery in the Pacific.

To be fair, the port plan is not and could never be entirely an external imposition. Fiji has been actively shopping a Suva port redevelopment for years. Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka pitched the project — covering port and shipbuilding upgrades — to Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2023, and Fiji Ports Corporation, which is 41% government-owned, has more recently held talks with US officials about a US$181 million upgrade as well as a more ambitious US$1.82 billion plan to relocate Suva Port. Rabuka has also struck a deal with the US Millennium Challenge Corporation for a feasibility study on port development. In that sense, the Quad’s announcement takes something from an existing Fijian wish-list rather than appearing out of nowhere.

Even so, it seems the Quad wants to experiment on Fiji, which has the attraction, for high-paid experts, of luxury resort hotels. Details are sparse, and it is still unclear how the Quad’s “first-ever joint infrastructure project” maps onto the plans Fiji has been developing, or how much say Suva residents have had in what is now being announced on their behalf from New Delhi.

Under the “Ports of the Future” partnership, Fiji becomes the pilot site for a Quad-led port upgrade and capacity-building program. Wong described the plan as the Quad’s “strongest ever commitment” to the Pacific, adding: “I was in Fiji just a couple of weeks ago, and I know how important this will be to that country.” It is a remarkably thin level of engagement for a project that risks turning Fiji into a quasi-Quad maritime base. And what is not clear here at all is what this means to Fiji’s sovereignty, what’s in the fine print and the terms and conditions. What’s the price Fiji pays for a Quad port?

The Quad also launched a new framework to coordinate investment in critical minerals supply chains, including mining, processing and recycling. The framework does not explicitly mention seabed minerals, but nor does it exclude them — and its emphasis on “supply resilience across the Indo-Pacific” aligns with recent US moves to accelerate deep-sea mining in a region that includes Pacific Island states with significant seabed mineral potential. As is being seen with the Cook Islands, Tonga and Nauru, among others, some Pacific states are already keen to sell the sovereignty of the ocean to the United States.

Some of the Delhi meeting was more security directed, including a call to expand work on maritime domain awareness.

Fiji’s response to the announcement has been cautious and, at times, caught off guard. Speaking in parliament on Monday 26 May, Rabuka said it was unclear whether the Quad initiative would slot into Fiji’s existing port plans or whether Fiji would press ahead separately.

“Whether we can fit it into that or we will still move ahead looking for public-private participation, [it will be] based on the plans we already have,” Rabuka said.

Those existing plans centre on Rokobili, at the northern end of Suva harbour, which Fiji Ports Corporation and the Asian Development Bank have shortlisted for the long-mooted relocation of Suva Port. Rabuka had earlier told parliament that the government backed a “mega port” there and had already developed a plan for a container terminal at the site. Also in 2025, he told the Fiji Times the port development was purely for development and not military purposes — a stance he has not walked back since the Delhi meeting.

“They want to help us so that we get up to the various targets that have been set by the international community on how nations tackle the challenges of the Millennium,” Rabuka said at the time.

Defence Minister Pio Tikoduadua has likewise insisted the Quad plan has nothing to do with China.

“It’s a port facility — it’s good for the development of Fiji and the region … (It) allows Fiji to support all of the functions of the state in developing the economy and security.”

Ironically, the Berlin Conference was itself partly triggered by dreadful port facilities in Apia, Samoa. In the 1880s imperial Germany and the United States were competing for control of Samoa, with Britain taking something of an interest. Mostly the competition involved creating civil wars in Samoa. As I describe in “Looking up Samoa on the map”, the high chief Mata’afa Iosefo inflicted a heavy defeat on German forces in the first Battle of Vailele in 1888 (10 years later in the battle’s second edition, he did the same to allied British and American forces). This prompted a build-up of naval forces parked in Apia harbour, an exposed and dangerous port, and on 15 March 1889, a cyclone hit. Six ships were wrecked and 146 crew killed. The great powers, having created chaos, then sought “order” — and convened the Berlin Conference.

Fiji writer Charlie Charters, commenting on the Quad, reached back to Berlin and its times:

“The Berlin meeting produced the 1889 Tripartite Declaration — cleaving the Samoan islands into a German colony [now Samoa] and an American one [American Samoa]. A disfiguring that continues to this day. No actual Samoans were recorded as being present at either meeting.”

The 1889 Berlin Treaty established a tripartite protectorate, with Germany, Britain and the United States exercising joint influence over a nominally independent Samoa. The formal partition into German Samoa and American Samoa came a decade later, under the 1899 Tripartite Convention — but the point is right: the architecture for that later carve-up was built in Berlin, by outsiders, without Samoans at the table.

Fiji’s people might find the comparison with 1889 Samoa uncomfortable, but the parallel is clear: powerful states making decisions that affect Pacific nations without those nations present.

Of course, the contexts differ. The Berlin Conference produced a binding condominium-style arrangement that set the terms for Samoa’s eventual partition in 1899. The Quad’s statements are political commitments among its members. Berlin shaped Samoa’s political fate; the Quad meeting determined infrastructure and security initiatives that will shape Pacific regional dynamics.

Pacific Island societies have long histories of colonial partition, strategic competition and outsiders imposing their own geopolitical aims on them.

At best it can be said the Quad is not dividing territory, or imposing governance, yet.

And places like Samoa and Fiji are sovereign and independent, and while Australia and others seek dominance, they do belong to international and regional institutions.

The Quad style of meeting and statements is a critique of great-power behaviour in the Pacific. It highlights a recurring pattern where powerful states make decisions about the Pacific without Pacific participation. It is far from “Pacific-led, Pacific-owned” decision-making.

A version of this article was first published on the South Pacific Tides Substack.

About the author/s

Michael Field
Michael Field is a journalist and editor of South Pacific Tides.

The Albanese government’s fifth federal budget sees Australia’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) increase in nominal terms from an estimated $5.097 billion in 2025-26 to $5.450 billion in 2029-30. This increase is partly the result of the government’s applying its promised 2.5% annual increase to “base ODA” from 2026-27 to 2036-37 (see breakdown in Table 1). When adjusted for inflation, however, Australia’s aid spending is estimated to fall by 3% between 2026-27 and 2029-30 and by 7% since Labor’s first budget in 2022-23. As a result, allocations for several of Australia’s core multilateral contributions have been reduced or ceased and “reprioritised” to fund bilateral and regional programs as the global energy and economic shocks from the US-Israel war with Iran continue.

Devpolicy’s analysis of the 2026 budget can be found on the blog, the podcast and our YouTube channel. Relevant sections of the Australian Aid Tracker have been updated with the latest figures.

Analysis of the 2026 budget has also been published by the Australian Council for International Development, the Lowy Institute, the Development Intelligence Lab and the Australian Global Health Alliance.

The 18 members of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), including Australia and New Zealand, have formally invoked the provisions of the 2000 Biketawa Declaration “to support a coordinated regional response to the emerging energy crisis affecting the Pacific region”. The last time PIF leaders invoked the Declaration was in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has said that Australia is working with other development partners “to back in a Pacific-led response to these global shocks”.

Ahead of the budget, the government announced that Australia will provide $30 million in budget support to assist Fiji’s response to the fuel crisis. Australia and Fiji have also joined eight other PIF countries in ratifying the treaty governing the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), a regional climate fund that will focus on community-level adaptation projects and will be principally financed via interest earnings on capital contributions.

Commenting on recent high-profile player signings by the PNG Chiefs, including their living arrangements and tax status, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated that “I can’t think of any aid and assistance in our region in the Pacific, and we’re part of the Pacific family, that will be more important than support for the PNG Chiefs”. The components of the government’s ten-year, $600 million Pacific rugby league package that support the inclusion of the Chiefs’ franchise in the National Rugby League competition from 2028 are not ODA-eligible and are not counted toward Australia’s ODA spending by DFAT.

Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat has accused both Australia and China of “using their interests to try to undermine us” as Canberra and Beijing pursue competing bilateral agreements with Port Vila as part of their wider regional strategic contest. Napat says that the Vanuatu government has now reached consensus positions on both agreements. An earlier version of the Nakamal Agreement with Australia was ultimately rejected by Vanuatu in 2025 on the grounds that it could constrain the latter’s ability to obtain infrastructure financing from China.

The government has provided responses to two committee inquiry reports tabled in the previous parliament, one on alignment with Pacific Island countries’ priorities (November 2024) and the other on supporting the rights of women and children (November 2023).

DFAT is conducting a survey seeking feedback on AusDevPortal, its aid transparency website. The survey will be open until 12 June.

Regional and global aid

The World Bank has approved a new, six-year country partnership with PNG, worth US$1.2 billion, that will focus on job creation, agriculture and private sector development.

A new report by the US government spending watchdog has found persistent delays in US funding disbursements under its longstanding compact agreements with Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. These delays are attributed to compact states’ inability to complete required audit reporting in the face of rising costs, as well as the impacts of the Trump administration’s hiring freeze on the State Department.

A group of developing country shareholders and clients, including China and Brazil, have reportedly pushed back against the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken the World Bank’s climate change strategy, which expires in June, arguing for a one-year extension of the strategy to facilitate an independent evaluation.

A new outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and in neighbouring Uganda has been declared a “public health emergency of international concern” by the World Health Organization (WHO). As of 27 May, there are over 900 suspected cases and an estimated 220 deaths. The dismantling of USAID, along with other donors’ health aid cuts and ongoing conflict in the DRC, have impeded more timely detection of and response to the outbreak. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the WHO are seeking US$319 million in funding to support a coordinated emergency response over the next six months. There is as yet no vaccine for the strain of the virus behind this outbreak.

A bipartisan group of US legislators is urging the Trump administration to honour US$600 million in congressionally approved funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, before the funding expires at the end of September.

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Indonesia’s health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, confirmed that he has discussed nominating for the WHO Director-General position with President Prabowo Subianto.

The UK used its co-hosting of an international development conference to launch a new “International Coalition to End Violence against Women and Girls”, which includes Australia as one of its eight founding members. A parliamentary inquiry report released earlier this year highlighted the negative impacts that the Starmer government’s large and ongoing aid cuts are having on efforts to advance gender equality.

The Gates Foundation and technology company Anthropic have launched a new US$200 million, four-year partnership focused on extending the benefits of AI to “global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility”.

Books, reports, articles, podcasts etc.

Sam Vigersky from the US Council on Foreign Relations looks at how the US-Israel war with Iran has disrupted supply routes and increased humanitarian costs, including for the people of Afghanistan, for whom the war is compounding an already dire food security crisis.

Figure 1: How the US-Israel war with Iran disrupts aid routes to Afghanistan

Maia King from King’s College London unpacks the concepts of “ownership” and “partnership” in development cooperation. She finds that donor-defined applications of these terms often fail to give local actors the necessary agency to meet their domestic constituents’ understandings of accountability, legitimacy and contestability.

The role of evidence in shaping GiveDirectly’s journey to becoming a US$1 billion charity is among the articles contained in the first edition of In Development, a new online magazine “dedicated to exploring how progress happens — or doesn’t happen — in the developing world”.

Disclosure

Material for this update has been collected by Development Policy Centre staff. Editorial responsibility lies with Cameron Hill. The Centre’s work on Australian aid is supported by the Gates Foundation. Any views expressed are those of Centre staff only.

About the author/s

Development Policy Centre
The Development Policy Centre is part of the Crawford School of Public Policy under the College of Law, Governance and Policy at The Australian National University.

Amongst the committee’s numerous recommendations are those contained in the provisions of a Customary Land Tenure Bill attached as an appendix to the report. In its current form, the Bill proposes three major innovations.

First, to abolish the Customary Land Division of the Department of Lands and Physical Planning and replace it with a separate Customary Land Authority (CLA) with its own board of trustees.

Second, to repeal the amendments made to the Land Groups Incorporation Act and Land Registration Act in 2009 and make “clans” submit fresh applications for recognition by the CLA before they can be authorised to issue “customary land leases” to third parties.

And third, to require the holders of such leases to make all rental or compensation payments to the CLA in the first instance, before the CLA redistributes a proportion of this money to individual clan members.

The first of these proposals has been on the table for more than a decade. A review of the land reform process in 2018 observed that it had been endorsed by PNG’s National Executive Council in 2016, but that decision was soon abandoned in the face of strenuous opposition from the Lands Department. The proposal continues to resurface because of persistent doubts about the capacity of departmental staff to administer the legislation for which they are currently responsible, but it is not clear whether their shortcomings count as evidence of corruption, incompetence, political interference, a lack of resources or a combination of all these things.

The second proposal is based on a belief that the 2009 amendments do not go far enough to ensure that incorporated land groups (ILGs) truly represent the wishes and interests of the customary landowners whom they claim to represent. In a previous discussion paper, I pointed out that the many legal safeguards built into those amendments were not matched by evidence of effective implementation on the part of relevant government officials, and that is why the so-called “voluntary customary land registration” scheme was thought to have failed by the time of the 2019 National Land Summit.

If the first proposal is meant to solve the implementation problem, then one has to wonder why the addition of new safeguards cannot be accomplished by making further amendments to the existing legislation rather than getting rid of ILGs altogether.

The committee’s answer seems to be that the very idea of a “land group” needs to be cast aside because land groups cannot possibly be authentic entities if they cannot prove that they are “clans” — in other words, what we anthropologists would call unilineal (patrilineal or matrilineal) descent groups. However, there are perfectly good reasons why the Land Groups Incorporation Act has never included the word “clan” since it was first passed in 1974.

There are some parts of PNG where local people do not recognise the existence of such descent groups and therefore have no word for “clan” in their own language. There are other places where people do have a word like this, but where membership of such groups is not simply determined by descent through the male or female line. And even where unilineal descent groups do seem to be part of the customary social fabric, there is no reason to assume that their primary social function lies in the allocation of rights to the use of customary land.

So what will happen if the 2026 bill gets to be enacted and certified in its current form? Since the 2009 amendments came into effect in 2012, about 1,600 ILGs have received certificates of recognition from the Lands Department, but fewer than 130 of them have managed to secure registered titles over blocks of former customary land. There is currently no legal way to revoke these titles without evidence that they were issued by mistake or through some fraudulent action on the part of the registrar.

The 2026 bill allows three years for ILGs that only have certificates of recognition to reconstitute themselves as “clans” and then try to get new certificates on the basis of a new bundle of evidence to be submitted to the CLA. Those groups that have been established on some other basis, like a common place of residence rather than descent from a common ancestor, may not bother to do so. But that does not necessarily mean they will disappear. There are hundreds of ILGs registered before 2012 whose executives failed to apply for reincorporation under the terms of the 2009 amendments, but who continue to receive and redistribute royalties and other landowner benefits under the terms of the Forestry Act and the Oil and Gas Act. It is most unlikely that the government would risk the outbreak of serious public disorder by trying to block such payments.

The third proposal in the new bill could also prove to be rather unpopular. Although it is based on a widely held belief that land group executives cannot be trusted to distribute rental and compensation payments to all group members in a transparent and equitable manner, it is just as unlikely that people will trust the executives of the CLA to do any better.

That raises the further question of who will foot the bill for the operation of the CLA itself. While the latest report contains numerous complaints about the costs incurred by land groups in their efforts to comply with the terms of the current scheme, the additional safeguards prescribed in the new scheme can only make the whole business even more expensive. There are various passages in the latest report that invoke the generosity of the government. However, the government’s past failure to subsidise the existing scheme does not give much cause for optimism on that score. If the CLA is then obliged to cover a substantial portion of its own operational costs by making deductions from the revenues it collects on behalf of the customary landowners, then the customary landowners will soon be up in arms.

In my latest discussion paper on the alienation of customary land in Port Moresby, I have shown how people with money and power, including members of parliament, continue to exploit all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to get what they want. This suggests that the addition of more legal and institutional machinery to protect the interests of customary landowners is unlikely to put an end to the process through which those interests are betrayed.

While Donigi’s approval of the 2026 bill is evidently shared by most members of parliament, one does have to wonder whether the institutional constraints to the implementation of such drastic changes will be recognised before it is made into law.

About the author/s

Colin Filer
Dr Colin Filer is an honorary professor at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University.

I am reminded of this every time I write a review of a book that touches in some way on goings-on in the Canberra aid and foreign policy scene — I get messages from insiders in said scene telling me I’ve either been too tough on the subject or not gone hard enough. Insider tales and perspectives gush out, many of which are amusing, insightful, revealing or chatty, with a few teetering towards defamation. Yet when I ask these individuals to consider penning their own reviews, they go quiet and start to mumble about “not wanting to rock the boat”.

Which brings us to Nicholas Enrich’s book Into the Wood Chipper, a Washington insider’s account of being present at the dismantlement of USAID in the first few months of the second Trump administration.

The agency was among the first to be targeted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the title of the book stems from a late-night message from Musk that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone (sic) to some great parties. Did that instead”.

Enrich was USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health during that period. To use an Americanism that I learned during my own time in Washington DC, Enrich was a man who “keeps the receipts” — he documented every text and email and took contemporaneous notes on every bonkers, Kafkaesque conversation he had with the political appointees and senior bureaucratic enablers hellbent on dismembering USAID. The result is a book that is gossipy, scabrous, pointed, darkly amusing, occasionally profound, insightful on the bureaucratic condition and, in highlighting the cruel effects of these decisions, desperately sad. Enrich is not just a person with the courage to write but a person who can write. He is a pacy, engaging wordsmith with both a pleasingly snarky turn of phrase and an ability to produce vivid scenes that propel his hellscape narrative.

Apart from some scene-setting about what USAID was and potted personal biography, the period that his book covers is short. It spans from November 2024, when Donald Trump was re-elected, to early March 2025, when Enrich realised that he could not conscionably be a part of the process anymore. The organisation that he’d fought for had been reduced to less than a husk by then. He blew the whistle by releasing a trove of memos documenting what was going on behind the scenes.

I lived in Washington DC during the first few months of Enrich’s timeframe and can attest to how accurately he describes the jittery, forlorn, tense, anti-“woke” atmospherics of that time. These atmospherics were fanned by prominent voices in the MAGA-sphere on platforms such as X and podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience. (I worked as a senior adviser to the United States Institute of Peace from 2022 to 2025, and DOGE shuttered that organisation shortly after it had finished with USAID. The fate of the institute is a matter still before the courts, although it seems impossible for me to imagine it will return to its former self.)

Yet, as Enrich writes, even the most fatalistic could not have imagined what epic fury would be wrought unto foreign aid so soon after the inauguration. On his first afternoon back in office, President Trump issued an executive order for a “90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy”, which was followed soon after by another order decreeing a “stop-work” on all foreign aid projects.

The bland bureaucratese unleashed pandemonium. Staff working on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs immediately got fired, children receiving drugs in a promising tuberculosis trial stopped getting treatment, medicine and food bound for the needy began to moulder in ports and warehouses across the world.

And then, for Enrich, who was given the dubious honour of being promoted during this period, things get worse. He interfaces with political appointees, many of whom worked with the agency during the first Trump administration and nurse personal grievances against it. One such individual tells Enrich that he believed that USAID staff killed his family’s dog.

The administration announces a waiver for “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” but there is a lack of clarity as to what the waiver encompasses. Ever the bureaucrat, Enrich tries to save what programs he can in the bureaucratic manner he knows how, penning memos and crunching spreadsheets to make his case for reopening some health programs including one that would quell an Ebola outbreak in central Africa.

It is hopeless, as the direction is already set and the infrastructure to support these programs already obliterated. I wrote that Enrich was “like someone taking a banana to a gun fight” in the margins of the book at this point.

The political appointees (and their bureaucratic enablers) are simply not interested in Enrich’s reasons. The waivers are rendered a “farce”, Enrich writes, and no one wants to listen. One of the political appointees advises him to “take a step back” after he points out in one of his memos that terminating the contracts in such a wholesale manner would cost millions of lives.

The atmosphere grew ever stranger and more jittery as more colleagues are terminated and locked out of the building, with some being some reinstated and then fired again. As one example of the paranoia, he cites the case of a colleague who spent “all day eyeing a suspicious-looking croissant that had been mysteriously left on her desk, fearing it might be poisoned” only to learn it was a surprise pick-me-up from a concerned colleague.

Stymied at every turn, exasperated by the torrent of misinformation emanating from the Trump administration about USAID, Enrich realises his work is futile. With colleagues, he compiles documents outlining the impacts of the “pause”, the hollowness of the “waiver” and the impacts of the cuts both on vulnerable people around the world and the global reputation of the United States. Ever the good bureaucrat, he gives the memos the most bland titles imaginable. And then, in the sort of act that would cheer a pissed-off public servant anywhere, he sends the memos out in a mass email to current and former colleagues. Soon thereafter, one surmises, he starts to work on this book.

A little over one year on, the impacts of the abrupt rupturing of USAID are clear. A study published in The Lancet last year estimated that approximately an additional 14 million people could die by 2030 because of the cuts. A new Ebola threat in central Africa is growing, with the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring it a public health emergency of international concern.

Yet even with that stark figure, the ending of USAID feels like yesterday’s news, a topic too impolitic to raise. Governments, ahem, partners who received support from USAID barely mentioned the demise of the organisation at the time and don’t do so now. I was in Papua New Guinea recently and the only physical signs of USAID still visible were placards for abstruse workshops from yesteryear that remain hung up in government offices.

Some US health programs have started up again but on very different terms, now run out of the State Department. These are implemented by the same suite of managing contractors who used to implement USAID programs and who presumably have scrubbed forensically all references to DEI phrases and other now-verboten speak from their websites.

It is in the nature of obituaries that the dead are lauded and their blemishes, imperfections and worse overlooked. A similar halo effect can be observed in how AusAID is referenced nowadays, when it is mentioned at all. If I had my druthers, I wish Enrich had done a tad more reflection about what hadn’t been working well within USAID. My Devpolicy colleague Robin Davies described it once as a “harried, hamstrung and traumatised organisation”. I met some truly amazing people working within it but all labouring in the midst of an unbending contract model and spending way too much time developing metrics that it was doubtful anyone would either use or even understand fully.

Still, Enrich has done USAID a solid tribute with this blow-by-blow account of its demise. He is one gutsy fellow. As prominent writer, physician and senior appointee to USAID during the Biden administration Atul Gawande writes in his warm foreword to the book, Enrich wrote the book when he had “still-young children … a mortgage to pay [and] … no clear job ahead for his future.” That takes courage.

I hope his book gives others situated either in bureaucratic foxholes or nearby vantage points, all of whom have stories to tell, and many of whom are more financially secure than Enrich, the courage to write.

About the author/s

Gordon Peake
Gordon Peake is a writer, podcaster and consultant. His first book was an award-winning memoir of life in Timor-Leste, his second on the would-be nation of Bougainville.

What is scale? The core idea of scale in international development is bringing benefits to more people. Scale is defined here as the geographical spread of benefits to more districts, schools, teachers and learners. The OECD’s Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results-Based Management for Sustainable Development does not define the term scale. Its absence is consistent with the Glossary’s editorial approach to only include OECD countries’ agreed technical terms in common use.

That absence of agreement is revealing. The post to which I am responding, for example, does not define scale and that reflects the muddled state of affairs with scale where most development projects neglect to define it. Scale is linked to the idea of the sustainability of benefits, which is defined in the OECD Glossary as the extent to which the benefits of a change continue. However, sustainability and scale are different concepts: sustainability is the time dimension of change; scale is the spatial dimension.

Is scale grounded in science? Clear definitions are foundational in science but are often missing in the development and educational literature, and in professional practice. Definitions establish the boundaries of the phenomenon being studied, making claims about it measurable and falsifiable. Measurement for evaluation and research cannot produce reliable and valid data without clarity about what is being measured.

The post’s assertion that theory alone is rarely sufficient in complex systems is true. However, theory is the bedrock of science. From the limited research on scale in education, Cynthia Coburn’s work provides an example of theory-building. She argues that only defining scale as reaching more beneficiaries overlooks the challenge for project design and implementation activities to achieve deep and lasting change. Coburn conceptualises scale as having four interrelated dimensions — depth of change, sustainability, spread and a shift in reform ownership toward local actors. Scale depends on sustainability and is only significant if change is sustained in both the original and subsequent intervention sites.

The post’s focus on scale is timely. Donors’ current policy settings are far from adequate to address global development challenges. For example, Australia’s current International Development Policy does not present a policy position on achieving sustainability or scale, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)’s International Programming Guide provides no guidance on either. Yet the development policy is based on its “grand-scale” objective of a peaceful, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and on the Minister’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that begin with the goal of ending poverty in all its forms — “everywhere”.

However, in an example of policy incoherence, DFAT’s Design and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Standards does set out standards for sustainability, but not for scale. Sustainability and scale are conspicuously absent in Australia’s International Development Performance and Delivery Framework, where quality criteria are limited to effectiveness, efficiency, gender equality and disability equity. Effectiveness, the extent to which a development intervention achieves its objectives and results, is rarely a relevant criterion for evaluating sustainability and scale unless they are clearly specified as project objectives.

Why sustainability and scale are so often ignored is puzzling. Both are central themes in addressing the global development emergency, according to the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General in his foreword to the 2025 Sustainable Development Goals Report. Yet the reality is that they have not been central in development projects. That omission raises the question: if sustainability and scale are central to addressing global development challenges, why are they so rarely addressed?

Evidence from Indonesia’s education sector illustrates the significance of that question. Between 1971 and 2023, Indonesia received donor support through 114 education projects worth more than US$6 billion.

Analysis of donors’ reports from this support confirms the post’s opening assertion that “… success at pilot level does not guarantee success at scale”. Donor completion reports judged 82% of their projects to be successful. However, success at project completion did not translate into sustainability or the scaling of benefits.

Only 23 of the 114 projects (20%) were evaluated at least two years after project completion for valid evidence of the actual sustainability of project benefits. Twelve of those 23 projects (52%) showed evidence of actual sustainability. Comparisons of donors’ attention to actual sustainability show that this dimension was evaluated by the Asian Development Bank in 11 of its 27 projects and by the World Bank in four of 44 projects. Australia evaluated one of its 25 projects for actual sustainability. The evidence for scale was far weaker, with only four of the 114 projects (3%) evaluated in this dimension.

The important place of political leadership in implementation is rightly stressed in the post. But political leadership can be unreliable due to short-term instability. Donors’ reports emphasise in-country educational leadership and local ownership of change to achieve sustainable benefits at scale. Educational leadership is critical to drive depth of change. Without practices informed by a depth of understanding of educational principles and local cultural values, there is a shockingly high risk of failing to achieve desired change, as Gerard Guthrie has demonstrated in his thorough analysis from all 142 developing countries.

Is scale grounded in science? The idea of a “science of scale” remains more aspirational than realised. The post’s conclusion that “ … the science of implementation and scale is finally taking off” is not supported by the evidence presented. Francis Fukuyama cautions about being “scientific” and ignoring culture in development in his book, State Building:

The effort to be more “scientific” than the underlying subject matter permits carries a real cost in blinding us to the real complexities of public administration as it is practiced in different societies (p. 123).

If educational development projects are to move beyond successful implementation to achieve lasting, sustained change at scale, they will need coherent donor policies that require, support and reward the professional work necessary for cultural relevance, clearer definitions, stronger theoretical and evidential foundations and excellence in project implementation and evaluation, including the evaluation of sustainability and scale after project completion.

And that matters. As the UN Secretary-General has pointed out, 800 million people still live in extreme poverty. Lifting people out of poverty requires focused interventions supporting benefits at scale from sustained access to essentials like food, clean water, healthcare, education and economic opportunities. The development policy drift away from a strong focus on the sustainability and scaling of benefits from development interventions places that poverty alleviation goal at risk.

About the author/s

Robert Cannon
Robert Cannon is a visitor with the Development Policy Centre. He has worked in educational development in university, technical and school education, most recently in Indonesia and Palestine.

One of the most powerful protections for mothers and babies is giving birth with a skilled and caring health worker in a health facility. For many reasons this remains out of reach for many rural PNG families.

The reasons are well known: rugged geography, poor roads, limited transport, poverty, run-down rural health facilities and deep-rooted social norms around childbirth and gender roles. In many rural areas it is expected that women will deliver at home with female relatives in attendance.

Knowing the barriers is one thing. Finding solutions that change behaviour, and keep doing so over time, is another.

A recent initiative in Simbu Province funded by the Mola Foundation offers valuable insight: a write-up and analysis of this program has been submitted to BMJ Public Health.

Between 2019 and early 2026, an intervention was rolled out across 18 rural health centres. By combining modest non-financial incentives with practical improvements to rural health services, the program achieved something that has long proved elusive: it has doubled the number of women giving birth at the supported rural health centres and kept those gains over time. It is a simple idea (borrowed from a similar program in Cambodia) and built around local realities.

So what made the difference?

Rather than introducing cash payments or complex new schemes, the program focused on four straightforward, locally designed elements:

• Baby bundles (care packages) for women who come to health facilities for supervised birth: these contain all the items the mother will need for her newborn, personal items for mothers, a gift for fathers and a small amount of food rations for the postpartum period.
• Upgrades to health centres, including lighting in the birthing suite plus cleaner and more private maternity spaces, running water and essential delivery equipment.
• Upskilling community health workers (CHWs) with training in respectful, welcoming and quality midwifery and newborn care, as well as in handling common obstetric emergencies. This training has now been carried out in 12 provinces. CHWs are nursing staff with basic training and are the backbone of rural facility care in PNG.
• Community engagement, including encouraging husbands to support birth planning and welcoming families into maternity spaces.

At first glance, the baby bundle often gets the most attention. Costing around AUD40 per birth, it includes items many families struggle to provide, including nappies, baby clothes, a baby blanket, a towel, soap and a wrap, rubber thongs and an umbrella for the mother, and a valued tool (spade head, or file to sharpen axe and bush knife) for the father. But the bundle is only part of a much bigger story.

Looking at health centre data over four years, researchers found a sharp increase in facility births immediately after the program began. On average, monthly births at participating centres increased by around two and a half times. While numbers didn’t continue climbing indefinitely, they stayed close to double pre-intervention levels two years later. In a context where many incentive programs see a short-lived spike followed by a return to old patterns, this sustained change matters.

A mother of triplets received three baby bundles at Yampu, Enga Province (Glen Mola)

Researchers also found that women and their husbands consistently said they preferred giving birth at a health centre because it felt safer for themselves and their babies. What had changed was that the health centre now felt like a place they were welcome to use and give birth. Three factors stood out.

First, reducing shame and financial stress. For families struggling to meet their daily needs, the expectation that parents should arrive with clothes, wraps and supplies for a newborn can stop women from going to a facility at all. Fathers in particular described feeling ashamed if they could not provide all the items health centre nurses demanded of them.

The baby bundle removed that pressure. Instead of embarrassment, families spoke about pride and appreciation for the health workers who provided the bundles as a “gift”, in line with local customs of reciprocity.

Second, better experiences of care. Improved privacy, lighting and cleanliness mattered deeply to women. So did being treated kindly. Women repeatedly said they trusted upskilled CHWs who showed empathy, stayed with them during labour and explained what was happening.

Third, changing men’s roles. Traditionally in many PNG communities, men have kept their distance from childbirth. But the program actively encouraged male involvement in antenatal, labour and delivery care, gently challenging existing norms.

Men who supported their partners through labour described a deeper appreciation of what women experience during birth as well as a stronger commitment to making sure future deliveries happened at health centres.

An important finding from the study was that most women said they would still return to a health facility even if the baby bundles stopped. The women who had given birth in their local health facility and their husbands have become strong advocates for the program in their communities.

That tells us something crucial: incentives helped trigger first use but quality of care is what sustained demand.

In other words, incentives are not a shortcut. They work best when paired with investment in frontline health services, staff support and community trust.

In addition to reduced maternal and newborn mortality rates, the program provided significant collateral benefits. An Australian Doctors International (ADI) evaluation of the initiative found that 83% of newborns received full immunisations, almost half of mothers accessed immediate postpartum family planning services and more than 80% accessed additional services such as human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infection (HIV/STI) testing and malaria screening. Support and education for breastfeeding was also provided.

This experience aligns closely with PNG’s own ambitions represented in the National Health Plan and Australia’s longstanding partnership approach to health systems strengthening.

Rather than creating parallel programs, the intervention worked through existing government and church-run rural facilities. And the program addressed both demand and supply side of the birthing care equation and did so in ways that made sense locally. At a relatively low cost per birth, the program demonstrated strong value for money while advancing gender equality, rural service delivery and locally led development.

Incentivisation of supervised birth for rural women has been incorporated into the PNG Government’s National Maternal and Newborn Care Policy released in 2023. However, no funding has been allocated to implement this policy at a national level.

Women in rural PNG have long understood the risks of giving birth without skilled care. What this project shows is that when health services feel safe, respectful and accessible, and when families feel supported, sustained behavioural change is possible.

Note: Accurate health statistics are difficult to ascertain in Papua New Guinea due to the lack of verified population figures and the reporting of birthing outcomes. While figures often quote slightly more than four out of ten births are assisted by a skilled attendant, the population of Papua New Guinea is known to be underestimated by up to two million people. The World Bank lists the mortality rate of infants in PNG as 31 per 1000 live births (2024) with research showing mortality can be four times higher if birth occurs at home without a skilled attendant.

Disclosure

The supervised birth incentivisation program described in this blog is funded by the Mola Foundation, a charitable organisation established by the author in Papua New Guinea in 2021. The baby bundles were distributed with support from the Old Dart Foundation of UK, the PNG Kumul Petroleum Foundation and the Curragadhene Foundation of Melbourne. The Australian Doctors International Baby Bundle Pilot Evaluation was funded by the Australian Government through the PNGAus Partnership.

About the author/s

Glen Mola
Dr Glen Mola is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Head of Reproductive Health at the University of Papua New Guinea School of Medicine where he has worked for 40 years. He was awarded the Order of Australia for services to women's health in the Pacific in 2023.

In August 2021, my family left Kabul when the Taliban came back to power and we had to leave our home and all that was familiar to us. I was then a high school student and I wished to follow my dream of becoming a doctor because I thought education would protect me against the world’s confusion. However, the act of going across the border into Pakistan froze that belief. We didn’t find any waiting classes, any teachers, any assurance of the future — only the raw realities of displacement and uncertainty.

This isn’t only my case; it is the case for thousands of Afghan refugee children in Pakistan. The National Commission on the Rights of the Child Pakistan indicates that only 28% of school-aged refugee children have access to public schools or schools supported by UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. The rest, who would love to study, are pushed out by law or policy. To access formal schools, certain documents such as birth certificates, national identification and family registration records from Afghanistan are required. However, most families fled quickly without these documents or lost them along the way. Even when they do produce them, they are often turned away, leaving children to spend years waiting at home.

For the children this means lost years of education and for parents it means watching their children grow up believing that education is for others, not for them. Even when schools are open to refugee children, costs such as fees, uniforms and transportation become barriers for families already struggling to survive. For many, the choice is not between school and no school, but between school and food. Even worse, girls are even more restricted to their homes because of safety concerns.

In response, communities and small organisations have stepped in where formal structures fall short. Across Pakistan, a quiet network of community groups and small organisations is trying to hold the promise of education together for Afghan refugee children. These are not large, well-funded systems but improvised efforts shaped by necessity. They have created informal schools and classrooms, learning circles and support networks that attempt to bridge the gap between exclusion and opportunity.

My TOEFL House Learning Circle was formed by two Afghan educators in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Parents and young adults met every day in a community centre, using donated books and online resources to support each other’s learning. Over time, these informal circles not only improved the academic skills of the children but also gave families a strong sense of support and community.

In Mohammadi Chowk, another group of Afghan families gathers every day. Without a formal school building, they meet in a small, shared space, sometimes inside a mosque or a community centre. Using donated books and free wi-fi, these informal gatherings allow children to study, share knowledge and grow together.

Dawood Hosseini, an educated Afghan, established a refugee-led group there that provides informal classes for younger children in rented rooms or community centres in yet another part of Rawalpindi. These informal classes focus on core subjects like literacy, maths and English, along with Afghan cultural studies to preserve their heritage and identity.

Refugee-led groups play an important role in sustaining access to education and at the same time ensures that cultural identity is retained during migration. These efforts are not perfect, but they reflect a practical and human response to a crisis that policies alone have not resolved. They show that while the barriers are real, so too are the attempts, often quiet and unnoticed, to overcome them.

Local organisations try to support these spaces with supplies or small stipends, but funding is uncertain and inconsistent. There is also the challenge of recognition. Children who study in these informal settings rarely receive certificates that are accepted by formal education systems, making it difficult for them to transition into schools later.

There are important lessons in these experiences for those working in humanitarian education.

First, community-led efforts should not be seen as temporary or secondary, but as essential foundations that deserve support and investment. These initiatives understand the realities of refugee life better than any external system and are often the first to respond.

Second, reducing barriers to formal school enrolment would immediately expand access. Flexible policies around documentation and fees could allow thousands of children to return to classrooms.

Third, education programs must be consistent and long-term. Short-term interventions cannot address a crisis that has already lasted for years. Refugee children need continuity, recognition of their learning and pathways into accredited systems.

Finally, listening to refugee communities themselves is critical. They are not only beneficiaries but partners with knowledge, resilience and solutions shaped by lived experience.

It is clear that these learning spaces offer something vital: a sense of normalcy, dignity and hope. They show that even in displacement, communities are not passive recipients of aid but active creators of opportunity.

Education in exile isn’t merely a learning process but an act of resistance. It says that borders and political indifference will not define our lives. “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world,” as Malala Yousafzai told the United Nations in 2013 as a sixteen-year-old. The pen of Afghan refugees is often broken, but the hand holding it is steady.

Behind every statistic there is a true story … stories such as mine. A boy who lost his classroom, a mother who cried without making a noise, a family struggling to survive. Such tales seldom feature in the headlines, but the world should recognise the weight behind them.

Education shouldn’t be a privilege, but a lifeline. This crisis won’t be over until every Afghan refugee child in Pakistan is able to open a book without fear. While the world is preoccupied with borders and policies, Afghan refugees are waiting, not to be given charity but to be given a chance, not to be offered sympathy but to be granted justice.

A version of this article was first published by Refugee Research Online.

Disclosure

The author was previously a student at My TOEFL House Learning Circle, which supported Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The Learning Circle is no longer active due to recent changes affecting Afghan refugees.

About the author/s

Mehrullah Rahmani
Mehrullah Rahmanin is an Afghan writer and English teacher currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed a tremendous vulnerability of the Asia-Pacific: in 2024, the region received 84% of the oil shipped through the strait and 83% of its liquefied natural gas. But, while dramatic, these raw numbers are an inadequate lens for understanding what this crisis is actually doing to the countries of the region.

The disruption is transmitted via the political and economic architecture through which food reaches markets, fertiliser reaches farms, electricity reaches households, aircraft reach destinations and the remittances of an estimated 30 million Asian migrant workers in the Gulf reach their families.

And it involves not a single, uniform vulnerability. It is a rough spectrum that runs from Malaysia — a net oil producer, who nevertheless has to import oil for domestic consumption — to Myanmar, which is managing a fuel crisis on top of a civil war, and Pacific Island states that are extremely oil dependent and have limited reserves. Between those poles sits a variety of levels of exposure, response capacity and likely trajectories out of the crisis.

In these articles, we examine some of the similarities and differences as well as the implications for the region as a whole.

On 10 March, only 10 days after oil-tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was severely curtailed, Rashid Ahmed, a forty-two-year-old delivery rider in Dhaka, Bangladesh, tried three times before dawn to fill the tank of his motorcycle. Each time, the queues were too long, stretching around the block, and in the end he gave up. Stories like this played out across the region, from Sri Lanka to Pakistan to Cambodia.

In Sri Lanka, millions of people attempted simultaneously to register for the new petrol rationing system on 15 March. In Pacific Island communities, daily power blackouts have lengthened and people began missing medical appointments because transport costs made clinics unreachable. This is what the Council on Foreign Relations described in March 2026 as “energy chaos in Asia” — a phrase struggling to meet the moment during a disruption that is, in the assessment of the International Energy Agency, the “most severe oil supply shock in history”.

When shipping slowed to a trickle from 28 February, it wasn’t just about the flow of an individual commodity; it had a structural impact. It involved the withdrawal of a circulatory system on which much of the region’s productive economy currently depends.

Although Southeast Asia’s structural exposure is severe, the impact is internally differentiated. Malaysia, for instance, is a net oil-producer and imports only around 25% of its consumption. At the other end of the scale, countries that are very vulnerable are those highly dependent on imports from the Gulf for their oil needs — Singapore at 77% and Vietnam at 85%. South Asia’s picture is broadly as severe. Pakistan sources around 81% of its oil through the Gulf. For Bangladesh that proportion is around two-thirds and for Sri Lanka, approximately 60%. This level of dependency leaves South Asian countries structurally exposed to this kind of disruption.

For the Pacific, the situation is quite different, but in some ways even more acute. According to Jake Hamstra from Pacific Economics, “Pacific economies rely heavily on imported fuel and long-distance transport, with about 80% of their energy supply and most electricity generation coming from petroleum products”.

The scale and composition of government responses across the region reflect both the severity of the disruption and, more importantly, the limits of available instruments. At the more comprehensive end of the spectrum, Thailand, for instance, moved quickly, if at times clumsily, with multi-instrument packages. After freezing diesel prices for the first fifteen days of the crisis, Thailand’s Prime Minister announced a seven-step relief package that subsidises biodiesel, mandates government work-from-home and tops up fuel allowances in welfare card payments. Indonesia’s response was less pronounced, with increased subsidy spending and work-from-home mandates.

Further along the spectrum, responses became more coercive and less compensatory. Sri Lanka reintroduced mandatory petrol rationing on 15 March, closed schools and cut public services. Pakistan introduced a four-day government work week, deployed free public transport in Punjab and Islamabad, closed schools and used the army to manage distribution at key fuel stations. Bangladesh initially held domestic fuel prices unchanged by absorbing rising import costs, arranged emergency fuel imports and — according to The Asia Times — prevaricated over a fuel-card system.

The Nepal Times decried the limited government action, observing that, “Every time the price of fuel rises in Nepal, the country performs a familiar ritual: a longer weekend is announced, officials speak of austerity, an odd-even [system for vehicles] is mulled, and the nation tightens its belt, waits for the global market to settle, and then quietly returns to exactly where it was before: exposed and dependent.”

Some countries also had diplomatic policy options. On 26 March, Pakistan and Iraq were among several countries given transit permission by the Iranian government. Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines secured similar arrangements through direct talks with Tehran. Some of the region’s least resourced states — Myanmar, Timor-Leste and most Pacific Island nations — appear to have neither the relationships nor the leverage to pursue this path.

Looking across this differentiated picture, it’s clear that the severity of an external shock and the severity of its domestic consequences are not the same thing. They are mediated by the politics of governance capabilities — by the reserves a state has accumulated, the social protection systems it has built, the international relationships it has cultivated and the administrative capacity and incentives it can actually deploy under pressure.

It is already a story with a worrying distributional logic. The households that have lost income first are those furthest outside formal protections: gig workers with no platform support, garment workers with no shift guarantees, women managing households without cooking gas, Pacific islanders without the boat fare to reach a health clinic or school. The instruments some governments have so far deployed — price freezes, welfare card top-ups, free buses — reached some of these but not others. The Asian Development Bank starkly downgraded the region’s growth outlook at the end of April, in a region where millions hover just above the poverty line.

And that’s only the immediate impact of the crisis — the energy slowdown. What the situation suggests so far is that energy dependence is not simply an economic issue — it is a governance issue. The countries struggling most to absorb this shock are not necessarily those with the highest import ratios. They are the ones where fiscal buffers are thinnest, social protection systems most limited, and the political incentives to protect the most exposed households don’t seem strong enough to overcome the costs of doing so.

This is hardly new: only six years ago, COVID-19 moved through economies and societies in the region along strikingly similar lines. The shock didn’t so much create new vulnerabilities as expose and accelerate existing ones. If this is becoming the rhythm, then the question is no longer only how states respond in the moment but whether they are building the kinds of adaptive capacity that would allow them to absorb disruptions they cannot predict. That is a governance question, not an energy question.

This is a layered shock, and its next level is the productive economy: the network of processes by which energy is converted into food, manufactured goods, electricity and services.

The next article in this series asks: What is the crisis doing to productive economies? How is the disruption cascading through food supply chains, agricultural systems dependent on fertiliser, electricity generation and industrial output — and which economies face the most serious structural damage?

Read part 2 and part 3.

Disclosure

This article is published as part of the Development Policy Centre’s collaborative relationship with The Asia Foundation.

About the author/s

Nicola Nixon
Dr Nicola Nixon is Senior Director, Governance at The Asia Foundation and is based in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Kazi Faisal Bin Seraj
Kazi Faisal Bin Seraj is Country Representative of The Asia Foundation in Bangladesh, based in Dhaka. He previously worked for BRAC International and served as TAF Country Representative in Myanmar.

To grasp the full extent of the current jolt across the region, it’s useful to look beyond the phrase “energy crisis”. That suggests that what is at stake is solely the price of fuel, which is a problem of affordability, temporary and bounded.

What the Hormuz disruption has produced is something more significant: a layered shock in which the next level up is the productive economy — that is, the network of processes by which energy is converted into food, manufactured goods, electricity and services. When those are interrupted — as we’re seeing across the region — the consequences cascade. That involves seeing the lines at the fuel pump while also seeing beyond them to the multitude of industrial processes that are, for better or worse, currently reliant on that energy.

This sustained disruption to energy supply raises the costs across all sectors while degrading the productive capacity of multiple sectors simultaneously.

The most immediate knock-on effect has been through food supply chains, due to lack of access to fertiliser. Around one-third of the most widely used nitrogen fertiliser is exported from Gulf countries through the Strait. Since early March, millions of tonnes of fertilisers have been stranded with no viable alternatives available and, as a result, prices have risen by 35% since late February.

The timing has been particularly troubling. Bangladesh’s boro — the rice crop that provides the bulk of the country’s domestic food supply — requires consistent fertilisation and irrigation from March onward. Multiple reports from March 2026 note that Bangladesh has shut or suspended production at four of its five state-run fertiliser factories because of a worsening gas shortage.

Indian media reported at least one domestic fertiliser plant shutting down and others cutting production, while Sri Lanka’s March planting season was similarly disrupted, with the LPG shortage that eliminated cooking gas for households also cutting off the cooking fuel and agricultural inputs on which smallholder farming depends.

The downstream consequence is not only cost but yield. The damage will likely not fully materialise until harvests in the second half of 2026, producing what the Food and Agriculture Organization foresees as a second wave of economic pressure lagging several months behind the supply disruption itself.

Other industries are also visibly affected, squeezing the supplies of petrochemicals needed to make everyday items like shoes, clothing and plastic bags, with price rises on plastics, rubber and polyester. Bangladesh is feeling this in the starkest sense. Its ready-made garment sector accounts for 84% of the country’s export earnings and employs millions of workers, the majority of them women. With power cuts doubling to as much as five hours per day, factories have faced difficult choices. Running diesel generators during extended outages dramatically increases operating costs. Reports suggest that many textile and garment factories operated at only 40-50% of capacity, and these production losses threatened export orders.

Further along the supply chain, India’s ceramics industry in Gujarat — a sector dependent on gas for kiln firing — shut down in early March. In Mumbai, restaurants closed partially or entirely as cooking gas deliveries stopped arriving. Across Southeast Asia, Hormuz-related shortages are already forcing plastics and chemical plants to cut output, and manufacturers in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand have warned that continued disruptions could translate into shortages and higher prices for everyday packaged foods, household products and other consumer goods.

The electricity dimension has been less visible in global coverage but is structurally significant in many countries in Asia and the Pacific where supply challenges are already an issue. Gas supply to Bangladesh’s power sector dropped considerably in March and into April, with officials warning that the reduction could lead to blackouts. Sri Lanka introduced a four-day working week partly as a demand-reduction measure for the grid. In Pacific Island nations, where diesel generators underpin most electricity generation, prices for diesel, petrol and kerosene rose by as much as 70% in Papua New Guinea, and daily power blackouts lengthened across communities that had no alternative generation capacity to draw on.

All these knock-on effects raise a concerning question: to what degree are the economies in the region being hit by structural damage — that is, effects that reshape the economy’s productive capacity in ways that outlast the disruption itself? That depends not only on the degree of energy-import dependence from the Gulf, but the concentration of that dependence in large sectors dominated by low-income workers, and limited recourse to buffers such as reserves, social protection or productive diversification.

By those criteria, Bangladesh faces acute structural exposure. Its near-total dependence on imported energy coincides with a garment-dominated export sector that is both energy-intensive and time-sensitive. A prolonged closure of the Strait could have an economic impact stretching over years, not months. Sri Lanka, still working through an International Monetary Fund-supported recovery from its 2022 sovereign debt crisis, remains one of the most vulnerable South Asian economies to renewed external shocks, with narrow foreign-exchange buffers and high debt burdens. In Southeast Asia, countries like Vietnam have high structural vulnerability: highly import-dependent, with large informal sectors. In the Pacific, poverty, food insecurity and inequality could worsen, alongside job losses and displacement of migrant workers.

The United Nations is already predicting region-wide inflation. As parts of the region’s productive economy fail, they do so along the most vulnerable links and, in Asia and the Pacific, those links tend to run through the same populations that were already on the margins before the first oil tankers were halted.

In the third and final instalment in this series, we will examine what recovery actually means for Asia and the Pacific, along three tracks: physical supply restoration, price normalisation and a slower return to pre-crisis growth, food prices, remittances and tourism. We argue that the crisis could accelerate the energy transition, but that the distribution of harm ultimately reflects pre-existing conditions and governance capacity.

Read part 1 and part 3.

Disclosure

This article is published as part of the Development Policy Centre’s collaborative relationship with The Asia Foundation.

About the author/s

Nicola Nixon
Dr Nicola Nixon is Senior Director, Governance at The Asia Foundation and is based in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Kazi Faisal Bin Seraj
Kazi Faisal Bin Seraj is Country Representative of The Asia Foundation in Bangladesh, based in Dhaka. He previously worked for BRAC International and served as TAF Country Representative in Myanmar.

At the time of writing, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is running at about 5% of the pre-war rates — from around 3,000 ships per month to 154 recorded in March. The restoration of that supply is and will likely continue to be the focus of media and policymakers. Yet crisis recovery in Asia and the Pacific is no longer tied solely to that factor, as it has set in motion a sequence of consequences of differing likelihood and scale and with different timelines.

Understanding which of those consequences might be irreversible, which are still contingent and what they mean for the region’s economic and governance landscape over the coming years requires disaggregating what “after” actually means.

When physical supply is normalised — that is, when fuel begins arriving again at volume — recovery will start. For some countries, this has already commenced. India has deployed warships to successfully escort several oil tankers through the strait with permission from Tehran. Pakistan, too, secured transit for a small number of tankers. For countries that secured no such access — including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Pacific Island states — the restoration of physical supply will depend entirely on the whole system starting up again.

Price normalisation is likely going to be on a slower track. Additional costs such as insurance premiums and elevated freight rates will persist for some time independently of whether the strait is formally open. Market analysts warn that even if it reopens quickly, disrupted oil supply chains will take months rather than days or weeks to return to normal. For Fiji, this distinction is particularly troubling. There, the Reserve Bank warned that upcoming fuel-price reviews could translate into an almost 50% jump in domestic fuel prices, meaning that for many Pacific Island economies, the first phase of post-crisis recovery will coincide with sharp price increases rather than a period of relief.

Perhaps an even slower track will be the return to pre-crisis growth levels, food prices, remittance flows and tourism numbers, which in some cases may not fully occur. The disruption to fertiliser supply chains that began in early March will likely not fully manifest until the second half of 2026, when harvest yields across South and Southeast Asia will reveal the extent of the damage from disrupted planting seasons. Whether yield losses are modest or severe, the food price and food security consequences will arrive at a moment when household incomes are already compressed by months of elevated transport and energy costs.

All of which shines a light on the elephant in the room: the extent to which the crisis might contribute to the institutional, financial and political conditions needed for a shift away from fossil-fuel dependence. Alternatively, the dominant response could be a managed return to the pre-crisis energy architecture once the strait is functioning again. The signals are mixed. In Pakistan, demand for electric motorbikes soared in March, while the prime minister chaired a meeting on energy security in late April, declaring a target of 30% electric-vehicle adoption by the government in five years. In April, the Cambodian government cut import taxes on electric vehicles, while the Thai government is increasing incentives and streamlining approval procedures to stimulate the purchase of residential rooftop solar systems.

The political economy of energy transition in the region has historically been shaped by the relative cost and convenience of fossil fuel imports. This crisis has altered that calculus significantly — and the evidence of the past two months suggests it is doing so not only at the level of government policy declarations but also at the household level. Whether governments treat these elevated energy security risks as merely an exceptional event to be managed and then forgotten is yet to be determined. Nevertheless, there are policy signals that suggest that the crisis might also accelerate the energy transition, particularly if the structural weaknesses it has exposed become too difficult to avoid.

What the crisis has demonstrated is that the distribution of harm in a supply shock is not determined solely by the shock itself but by the conditions in place before the shock arrived and the governance capabilities in place to respond to it: the reserves accumulated, the social protection systems, the diplomatic relationships, the administrative capacity and incentives. Countries that had developed those — even partially, even imperfectly — have been able to deploy them. Countries that had not have been left to wait. While the legacies of this crisis will vary significantly country by country, they are likely to shape the energy-policy environment for months if not years to come. Whether that’s for the better remains to be seen.

Read part 1 and part 2.

Disclosure

This article is published as part of the Development Policy Centre’s collaborative relationship with The Asia Foundation.

About the author/s

Nicola Nixon
Dr Nicola Nixon is Senior Director, Governance at The Asia Foundation and is based in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Kazi Faisal Bin Seraj
Kazi Faisal Bin Seraj is Country Representative of The Asia Foundation in Bangladesh, based in Dhaka. He previously worked for BRAC International and served as TAF Country Representative in Myanmar.

Evacuation centres have become a familiar refuge in the Pacific, and a familiar danger. Families sleep side by side on classroom floors. Privacy disappears and tensions rise. For a woman experiencing violence, the options narrow quickly. The road to the police station is damaged. Clinics are closed or overwhelmed. Phone networks are down. The systems meant to protect her are out of reach.

Community leaders, church groups and women-led organisations work under enormous pressure to keep families safe in these centres. Without proper resources, training and design standards that build in privacy and protection, good intentions are not enough, and the burden continues to fall heavily on frontline actors.

At the same time, ministries responsible for women’s affairs across the Pacific are increasingly recognising violence against women and girls as a cross-cutting issue, including in the context of climate change and action. They are working to strengthen coordinated, multi-sector responses that bring together police, health, justice and social services, and are beginning to integrate prevention into wider resilience and climate adaptation efforts.

While this shift is significant, these ministries cannot do this on their own. They are chronically underfunded, and as climate impacts intensify, the pressure on national systems will only grow. If climate responses are going to deliver resilient and sustainable futures, governments and development partners need to invest in the systems that keep women and girls safe, alongside the roads, seawalls and renewable energy.

When disaster hits a small island community, the damage extends well beyond flooded roads and broken infrastructure. The social fabric that keeps people safe is disrupted. Overcrowded shelters, economic stress and weakened services all increase risks for women and girls, but those risks are rarely picked up in loss and damage assessments or climate financing decisions. Losses are counted in damaged buildings, destroyed crops and kilometres of coastline eroded. The violence women experience in the aftermath usually goes uncaptured.

The Pacific records some of the highest rates of violence against women in the world. Prevalence studies show high lifetime rates of intimate partner violence, with up to 64% of women experiencing physical or sexual violence by a partner. What makes the Pacific particularly stark is how widely that violence is accepted. In Samoa, 37% of women and 30% of men believe a man is justified in hitting his partner in at least one circumstance. In the Marshall Islands, the figures are 56% of women and 58% of men. In the Solomon Islands, 77% of women and 57% of men agree. Where violence is this normalised, additional pressure from economic stress, displacement or overcrowding does not just add to the risk. It accelerates it.

Climate shocks are exactly that kind of pressure. Research from Kiribati’s Strengthening Peaceful Villages program looked at the 2020 drought and found a clear link between climate-related male income loss and intimate partner violence. 41% of men who had perpetrated intimate partner violence in the past year also reported reduced earnings. When patriarchal norms position men as breadwinners and climate change makes that role harder to fulfil, men’s mental health suffers and the risk of violence against partners rises.

Evidence from Samoa shows climate shocks also make it harder for women to leave violent relationships. Women who had lived through two or three disaster events had more than twice the odds of experiencing intimate partner violence in the past 12 months. For those who had lived through four or more, the odds were over eight times higher. The cumulative weight of these shocks wore down women’s mental health and, with it, their ability to seek help or leave.

Vanuatu tells a similar story. Cyclones, extreme rainfall and flooding are no longer rare. They arrive almost every year, often before households have recovered from the last one. For women already facing violence, the cycle of shock and recovery keeps them stuck in unsafe homes and shelters, with fewer options each time. The recently launched Second National Survey on Women’s Lives and Family Relationships sets out what intimate partner violence looks like during an emergency. One in two women have experienced physical or sexual violence, and 73% have experienced coercive control from an intimate partner in their lifetime.

Vanuatu has responded. We recognise this violence as a critical dimension of non-economic loss and damage, which moves the conversation beyond the purely economic impacts of climate change. Our Loss and Damage Policy and Implementation Plan commits to addressing both economic and non-economic impacts across all climate-related initiatives and financing. This is a world-first commitment, and it should become a regional and global standard.

The 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent commits to keeping all Pacific peoples resilient to climate change and disasters. With Pacific Island countries (PICs) among the most vulnerable in the world, the investment required is enormous. The International Monetary Fund estimates PICs need to invest between 6.5% and 9% of gross domestic product each year in adaptation-related infrastructure alone.

Large infrastructure projects move fast, bring in outside workforces and disrupt communities. Without proper safeguards, they can make women less safe. A mostly male workforce arriving in a community, poorly lit or badly designed public spaces, tensions over land acquisition and harassment of female workers can all increase exposure to violence. If those risks are not anticipated and managed, investments meant to build resilience end up undermining safety, participation and long-term sustainability.

When the risks materialise, the project itself is undermined. Community resistance grows, sustainability collapses and the investment fails to deliver. Many international climate funds already require environmental and social safeguards. Building violence prevention into those frameworks would help climate investments protect women and girls and produce better, more durable outcomes.

The same risk runs through climate adaptation, mitigation and disaster risk management more broadly. Planned relocation, for example, can heighten competition over land and deepen community tensions, leaving women and girls more exposed in unfamiliar surroundings with limited support.

Vanuatu’s experience tells us climate resilience and the safety of women and girls are not separate agendas, and it is asking climate finance partners to make this a condition, not an afterthought.

Climate resilience is not only about protecting coastlines. It is about protecting people. The Pacific has long led global conversations on climate justice. Recognising violence against women and girls as a climate-related impact, and funding the response, is the next part of that work.

As Cyclones Maila and Vaianu tracked across the Pacific, women were making their way to evacuation centres. The winds pass. For too many women, the violence does not. The question is what we choose to do before the next shock arrives.

About the author/s

Alison Davidian
Alison Davidian is the UN Women Representative for the Fiji Multi-Country Office, supporting programs across 14 Pacific Island countries.

Ralph Regenvanu
Ralph Regenvanu is Vanuatu's Minister for Climate Change Adaptation, Energy, Environment, Meteorology, Geo-Hazards and Disaster Management.

For most of the last decade, a shortage of foreign exchange was the private sector’s top complaint. But the just-published 2026 PNG 100 CEO Survey shows that access to foreign exchange is now much less of a problem for business. This is a real achievement, but what is bothering firms now, and how has it changed over time?

We base our analysis on a comparison of business impediments between 2014 and 2026. 2014 is chosen as our base year because it is the first year in which foreign exchange shortages were included as a constraint. We compare only those criteria that appeared in both surveys. A small number of constraints that were only asked about in 2014 or in 2026 but not both had to be dropped.

When ranking the 16 business impediments that appear in both the 2014 and the 2026 surveys, there is a lot of similarity over time. The overall correlation between the two sets of rankings is 0.78. Security was the equal first constraint in 2014 and is the second in 2026. Unreliable utilities was first in both years. Shortage of expertise is fourth in both years.

There are a few things firms are less worried about now. One of course is getting hold of foreign exchange: this has fallen from third to tenth place in the rankings. High employment costs have dropped from fifth to eighth place, competition from ninth to twelfth.

But three things have moved up in importance. Inflation has moved up from tenth to fifth, lack of market research from twelfth to sixth, and lack of government capacity from sixth to third.

In fact, the top three constraints are now all governance related: law and order, unreliable utilities and lack of government capacity. Improving law and order requires more jobs but also a more effective police force. A former police minister described PNG’s police force in 2020 to be “in complete disarray and riddled with corruption”. PNG’s state-owned electricity utility, PNG Power, has long been suffering from a governance crisis. Regarding government capacity, international indicators show PNG’s government effectiveness score declining over the 2010s and 2020s (See Figure 12.1 of Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust: an Economic History of Papua New Guinea since Independence).

Poor governance is a tax on business.

Business firms have to spend more on security when law and order are weak. A survey in 2014 showed that almost 80% of PNG’s businesses employ security guards. PNG’s security industry has now turned into the third largest employer in the country.

When power is unreliable, firms spend on expensive private generators. The head of the Lae Chamber of Commerce said last year that in Lae — the manufacturing hub of the country — businesses are “running 100% of the time on diesel generators tripling their operational cost”. And indeed a study of 8,483 firms across 25 African countries found that the cost of own-generation is three times higher than purchasing from the public grid. Coping is costly. A study of 243 firms in Uganda shows that poor public services result in firms investing in public capital themselves rather than making business investments. This means locking away employment opportunities that PNG desperately needs.

The impact of a lack of government capacity is harder to quantify. But, for example, government delays regarding the re-opening of the Porgera mine are estimated to have incurred care and maintenance costs of about K35 million every month. Most of the time though it is impossible to put a price tag on the inability of many departments and agencies to perform basic functions given persistent bureaucratic fragmentation and the absence of a strong development-oriented technocracy.

Poor governance is about much more than corruption, the usual focus of complaints about the PNG government. In fact, while corruption is also recognised by businesses as a problem, it comes in significantly lower (eighth in 2014, seventh in 2026) than the top three governance complaints of poor law and order, unreliable utilities, and a lack of government capacity.

Governance failures are hard to address. Foreign exchange shortages can be — and largely have been, at least for now — fixed by policy reforms, International Monetary Fund support and commodity price rises. But fixing the police, fixing PNG Power, fixing the bureaucracy — these are tasks many PNG governments have set themselves, but none has delivered.

There is clearly no easy solution. But a first step is to recognise that slow economic growth in PNG is, at its heart, a governance story.

The data over time from the Business Advantage surveys are available here.

Disclosure

This research was undertaken with the support of the ANU-UPNG Partnership, an initiative of the PNG-Australia Partnership, funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views expressed are those of the authors only.

About the author/s

Kingtau Mambon
Kingtau Mambon is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Stephen Howes
Stephen Howes is Director of the Development Policy Centre and Professor of Economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.