McCabe Centre awarded three-year grant to scale up Knowledge Hub work in the Pacific

Wednesday 8 January, 2020


Image (L-R): Program Manager Regional Health, Dr Frances Bingwor; Regional Coordinator for the Pacific, Daiana Buresova; Counsellor (Development Cooperation) Rochelle White; and Director, Jonathan Liberman.

We’re delighted to announce that the McCabe Centre for Law & Cancer has been awarded a three-year grant from the Australian Government Department of Health to support our work as a designated Knowledge Hub for the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC).

The funding will support our core Knowledge Hub activities of research and knowledge-sharing, a workshop to share lessons from Australia’s defence of tobacco plain packaging in the World Trade Organization, and three regional tobacco control workshops in the Pacific aimed at deepening the legal knowledge, expertise and skills of government lawyers and policymakers to improve health outcomes in the Pacific region.

We’re particularly pleased to be able to strengthen our regional collaborations in the Pacific through these workshops. The planned tobacco control workshops will help build on the momentum of our Pacific International Legal Training Course (ILTC) alumni, who have made great strides to reduce the non-communicable disease burden and improve health outcomes in the region through the effective use of law. These efforts are of particular importance in a region where non-communicable diseases are responsible for 80 per cent of all deaths and where almost a quarter of the adult population (15+ years) are tobacco smokers.

Since our ILTC began in 2014, Pacific alumni of the Program have developed or strengthened comprehensive tobacco control legislation in Samoa, Papua New Guinea, and Niue, among others, and are progressing laws and policies in many other Pacific countries. Their efforts have received international recognition, with Niue’s laws recently being described by WHO as the ‘strongest tobacco control legislation in the Pacific’.

The funding was first announced ahead of the Pacific Health Ministers’ Meeting in French Polynesia. In August 2019, our Director, Jonathan Liberman, and Regional Coordinator for the Pacific, Daiana Buresova, met with staff from the Australian High Commission in Suva, Fiji to discuss the workshops to be held there and hear what has been achieved by McCabe Centre alumni in the region.

For enquiries about participation in the workshop, please contact info@mccabecentre.org