A committee of communities, working since 1998.

History & heritage

How the association began

Senikau began in 1998 around a nakamal in Port Vila, where a group of women weavers, two school teachers and a village chief met to discuss a plain worry: the young people coming into town were losing the language of their own crafts. The women had been weaving pandanus for decades. Their daughters, working in shops and hotels, could no longer name the patterns. The group agreed to teach on Saturdays, and to write down what was taught. That register of patterns — kept in a school exercise book that is still in our archive — is the founding document of this association.

Within four years the Saturday classes had grown into an island network. Requests arrived from Tanna, then Malekula, then Pentecost, and they were rarely only about craft. Communities wanted help selling what they made, help getting girls back into school, help writing a letter to a government office. In 2004 the members voted to incorporate formally so the association could hold funds, sign agreements and be held accountable in law for what it promised. The committee has been elected by the annual assembly of members every year since.

The name Senikau — the flower of the tree — was chosen by the founding members because a flower is the visible sign of a root system nobody sees. That has stayed an accurate description of the work. Almost everything Senikau does is unglamorous: minutes, consent forms, costings, transport to a clinic, ten days of practice with an elder until a stitch is right.

Today the association serves 63 member communities across five provinces, employs eleven staff and works with more than two hundred volunteers. It has survived four major cyclones, and after each one the same pattern held: the communities that had organised themselves before the storm recovered first. That is the case for everything on this website.

Mission

To foster resilient Ni-Vanuatu communities through inclusive social development, sustainable local livelihoods, and the celebration of traditional wisdom — so that families can prosper on their own islands, in their own languages, on their own terms.

Vision

A Vanuatu in which custom knowledge is treated as living expertise rather than folklore; in which a woman weaver, a smallholder grower and a young graduate all have a real seat where decisions are made; and in which no person is excluded from community life because of their gender, island of origin, disability, social standing or belief.

Values in practice

• Consent before record. No custom knowledge is documented without the free, prior and informed consent of its holders, and no such knowledge is ever sold.
• Work in Bislama, in the village. Training happens where people live, in the language they think in.
• Open books. Accounts are read aloud, line by line, at the annual assembly and published on this website.
• Nothing is decided about people without them. Every program has participants on its review panel.