She’s a legend in the women’s movement in Samoa, an influential member of the Vailele Council of Women, and a proud mother of two. She’s a former Assistant Chief Executive Officer for the Programs, Training and Community Development Division of the former Ministry of Women Affairs. Palanitina Tupuimatagi Toelupe, at the national and community level, pioneered the domestication of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). She continued to hold the same senior executive management role for the then newly set up Division for Women under the revamped Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development. She then moved to the Ministry of Health to take up the Chief Executive Officer position, and later, the Director General of National Health Services post. Palanitina is a deacon for the Vailele Congregational Christian Church of Samoa, a Director on the Board for Land Transport Authority, and continues to shape women’s development in Samoa as a technical consultant, under which falls her recent work on the ‘contextualization’ of the Spotlight Initiative’s gender-responsive budgeting initiative.

The gender equality trailblazer shared with UNDP how her partnership with UNDP, through the joint European Union and United Nations Spotlight Initiative, has impacted the work of women’s movement in Samoa.

Reflecting on the experience that has been and is particular to her work with the Samoa National Council of Women (NCW), Palanitina said: “I am their technical advisor, I am tasked to ensure programmes are developed and implemented, as well as ensure these programmes enhance and advance the capacity of women, not only traditionally but technically as well.”

Palanitina’s involvement with NCW is a natural progression. In fact, she regards it as more of a calling: ‘’Our grandmothers and mothers were part of this movement, so naturally we would be too. The NCW is the longest non-government women’s movement in Samoa. In 2015, I was recruited to design and support the implementation of the institutional revival of the NCW, with a constitutional focus on local governance by advancing women’s leadership skills in political and public life. The institutional strengthening initiative focused on the women members of the council. In the same year, the NCW received financial support to implement across 40 villages in Samoa, a grassroots advocacy campaign to prevent violence against women and children. I was tasked to integrate the two programmes, build the leadership capacity of women and through good governance they will be able to advocate for the protection of women from all forms of violence. These leadership characteristics are linked to women’s traditional roles as the daughters of the village, wives of high chiefs and orators, and wives of untitled men. These gendered roles are integral when it comes to local governance and development in their families and villages.

It is envisioned that empowering women with leadership skills through family and village welfare activities for example, is the pathway to the betterment of women’s lives. That has been the technical coherence and integration approach with programmes I was fortunate to support NCW with. The NCW is also privileged to have been given support from AusAID, and the EU and UN Spotlight Initiative to end violence against women through UNDP and UN Women.”

Palanitina regards her role as Technical Assistant as critical in ensuring linkages are made, and that all these projects are integrated.

“With the Samoa Spotlight Initiative through UNDP, the assistance was quite substantial. We were able to train 10 NCW women each from seven villages in Savaii and 10 NCW members in eight villages in Upolu. We trained more than 300 women. The trainings incorporated concepts of transformational leadership with the principles of Spotlight: Leaving No One Behind, Do No Harm, gender transformation, informed by local context and ensuring that through the village women, they can identify the women who have fallen through the gaps.

We explained the purpose and outcomes of Spotlight and emphasized it was not only about domestic violence prevention but being able to target and identify those who need it most. It was extremely important that the language and training content was unpacked and tailored to suit the community women, otherwise it is easy to get cross cutting issues overlapping with each other and then application becomes difficult.

Naturally, in the village setting, it is the older generation of women who attend the trainings. A strategic call went out to the women’s councils that it was mandatory for participants to have a young woman and an untitled woman that is married into the village (nofotane). Through the training of the 10 women from each village, we were then able to pair them up after the training, the older women from the initial training and the younger women having come in for the first time. There were five pairs in each village, and they were tasked to do five informal conversations on any issues that relate to domestic violence, whether it be alcohol use, family harmony, family dynamics, relations, or poverty, they were encouraged to talk about it. The women were tasked to facilitate conversations that would concentrate on primary prevention. The important thing was to remind the women that they are not qualified trained specialists, but they were qualified mothers. And their conversations had to be done from a maternal approach, or a woman approach or a sister approach.