When she first tried for a seat in the Papua New Guinea parliament in 2017, Rufina Peter was a political novice who’d had a gutful.
While many candidates solicit votes with lavish feasts and hollow promises, her shoestring campaign – handing out copies of her CV – struck a chord. She won the highest vote of any woman in the country, albeit not enough. PNG is one of only three nations in the world without a single woman in parliament. In its nearly 50 years since independence, the country has had just seven female MPs, meaning it has one of the worst records of female representation in parliament in the world.
