In this seminar we will hear from Leituala Kuiniselani Toelupe Tago-Elisara, director of the Pacific Community’s Social Development Programme (SDP). The SDP’s goal is to ‘advance gender equality, social inclusion and cultural diversity to obtain equal development outcomes in key settings across the region’.

During the seminar some of the challenges faced by women and youth face in the region will be discussed, as will the ways the SDP is seeking to address them, highlighting lessons learned and how these lessons may be applied in the future.

Accounts of male urban youth within Solomon Islands, like much of Melanesia, frequently tend towards apocryphal depictions of listless, troublesome and disengaged young men. Similar to other post-conflict, developing states, a large and growing cohort of undereducated and underemployed urban males is often associated with prospective instability and violence. However, few studies in Melanesia have attempted to transfer to the page the rich, grounded, candid, and often contradictory, stories of young male urbanites.

Speakers biographies:

Ms Shaharzad Akbar is Country Director for Open Society Afghanistan, and co-founder of the youth-led political movement Afghanistan 1400. She completed her first degree at Smith College in the USA, and as a Weidenfeld-Hoffman Scholar was the first Afghan woman to study at Oxford University, where she obtained an MPhil in Development Studies. She has also worked as a Partner at QARA Consulting, Inc.