Women’s Livelihoods in West Papua (Indonesia)
Papua and West Papua remain the poorest provinces in Indonesia, with limited opportunities for employment, quality education and health care.
UnitingWorld works with our partner church GKI-TP and its development unit P3W to help alleviate poverty, improve nutrition and empower women and children. P3W currently provides skills training, WASH and disaster preparedness to several communities in the highlands and around Jayapura.
Through the project, groups of women are helped to grow vegetables like soya and kidney beans, spinach and kale in their gardens. The women use it to feed their families and also supplement their family income. The groups are also provided with education and training about financial management, helping them be able to better save money for education and emergencies.
Indonesia, Province of Papua
Evangelical Christian Church in the Land of Papua (GKI-TP)
Poverty Alleviation
News from the field
- Investing in the skills of Papuan women
On a small island out on a lake in West Papua, a group of women are crafting themselves out of poverty by keeping a disappearing local art tradition alive. The banks of their lake home skirt the far limits of Papua’s most modern city, Jayapura, but people here still travel between the islands using wooden canoes. Traditional bark paintings (malo) have been produced by women from this area for hundreds of years. They spend weeks together making the canvases out of the beaten bark of fig ... - In a place of extraordinary hardship, people still rise
Earlier this year, I made a trip across West Papua. It’s just 150km north of Australia, but it feels a world away – one of the poorest regions in the Asia Pacific. Yet everywhere I went, what struck me most was the profound generosity and sense of community that bound people together. This runs deep in local culture and traditions, expressed so naturally it almost seems to grow up out of the soil. It’s also what makes our work with the local Church so effective. Over ...