Fiji - Safer Marketplaces for Women Vendors

Ba Municipality, Fiji - In the largest agriculture-based countries of the Pacific region -Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu and Fiji -- women market vendors have long been keeping their families and communities afloat. Here, selling fresh food is often the only way to earn cash incomes, and the vendors, 80-90 per cent of whom are women, power an industry with high financial turnovers.Yet such women battle invisibility and personal risk in their workplaces. Market vendors work an average of 10 hours a day and those from rural areas may spend two to three days onsite. They often sleep under open skies, falling victim to harassment, extortion, sexual violence and ill health. They work without basic amenities like toilets, shelter, water or cooking facilities, despite paying a daily market tax. Many of the women sellers maintain this tiring work routine despite social upheaval and natural disaster, and while pregnant and nursing. And until now, they have been given little say in how these markets are run. By partnering with governments and organizations of market vendors in Pacific countries, UN Women is working to make market spaces safer and better-suited to their female vendors. With its Partnership to Improve Markets project, the organization has surveyed, analysed and documented the situation faced by women market vendors, and recommended changes for by-laws and budgets plans. By partnering with the vendors to do so, it has built their capacities for advocacy, business and leadership. Read More: http://www.unwomen.org/2012/04/safer-spaces-and-better-markets-in-the-p…