June 18, 2026
In Wosera-Gawi, the EU-STREIT PNG
Programme has helped turn one district officer’s field
experience into a lasting local system. Beyond the
Programme’s direct support, Angela Gossiba and the community
advocates she trained are helping farming families plan
together, manage cash-crop income, and invest in family and
community priorities.
At a cocoa budding training
in Yembiyembi, a remote river community in Gawi LLG, East
Sepik Province, an elderly farmer stood up to speak. The
session had moved from grafting cocoa to how a household can
plan and decide together, using the drawing tools of the
Gender Action Learning System (GALS). He said he should have
had the training years before, when he was young enough to
build a life around it. What he could still do, he told the
room, was give it to his son, so the next household would
not repeat the old habit of one man deciding
alone.
Angela Gossiba ran that training, and she has
run many like it under EU-STREIT PNG Programme, as well as
under her own mandate as government officer. She is the Food
Security Officer for Wosera-Gawi District in East Sepik, a
post she has held since 2016, and since 2024 the Caretaker
District Agriculture Coordinator, with agriculture,
aquaculture, fisheries and livestock work across four
local-level governments and 106 wards. She joined the
provincial agriculture service in 2007. The role takes her
to settlements that rarely see a government officer.
“Being a woman doing agriculture work is very tough,”
she says. “You have to go out to very remote places. Many
times you have to walk. But I have enjoyed these challenges.
I walked a lot throughout the districts. I have slept with
farming families in the villages.”
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In those visits,
Angela kept seeing the same pattern. Women grow much of the
district’s food, yet many are kept out of the training,
finance, and decision-making that would let them do more.
Young people face similar barriers. “Most of the women
farmers in the district do not have access to facilities, do
not have access to resources, to opportunities,” Angela
says. “Access to resources and opportunities is very
limited to them.”
The EU-STREIT PNG Programme
trained Angela as a Gender Coach, one of around 70 drawn
from government officers and lead farmers across East and
West Sepik. That mattered because Angela was not temporary
project staff. She was already part of the district
agriculture system. When a district officer is trained, the
capacity and knowledge stay in use beyond the Programme. The
training built on what Angela already had. “What I learned
from the trainings was just like filling in the gaps for
me,” she says. “I had already the energy, the knowledge,
the skills. But there were just some parts that I was
lacking, which GALS came in and filled up.”
The
method, known GALS, gave her a way to reach farmers who are
often left out by written planning. Instead of a project
document, families draw. They map where they are, where they
want to go, and the steps between, using tools like the
Vision Journey and the Happy Family Tree. “The GALS method
is a very simplified version of project planning,” Angela
says. “Our people in the villages, they cannot write up
this project planning in the narrative. But when we had this
on paper and through drawings, they were able to
understand.” The drawings also make household roles
visible. When a family maps the daily workload and who
controls the income, the conversation shifts. Labour that
once went unnoticed is now on the page, along with the
question of who has been deciding alone.
In Blamda,
North Wosera, Angela’s work combined practical cocoa
support with household planning. She established a certified
budwood garden for cocoa pod borer-tolerant seedlings, and
more than ten communities now draw planting material from
it. The EU-STREIT PNG Programme’s trainings in leadership,
MSME development and finance also helped farmers open bank
accounts, while many households now operate cocoa
businesses.
For Angela, the most telling change
happened away from the cocoa blocks and inside the homes, in
Blamda. In the family of Raphael Wani, decisions had once
followed a familiar pattern. “Before the GALS training,
the family did not work together,” she says. “The father
was always the head. He always made the decision for the
family. He did not involve his wife, his children. But after
the GALS training came in, he started to see the importance
of involving his family.” The household plans together
now.
In Burui village, in Burui Kunai LLG, the method
helped a couple make a practical decision about cocoa
income. Nereus Saun and his wife Jaqueline Sakat both wanted
to study. Cocoa income had covered her college fees, but
there was not enough for his. After Nereus took the GALS
training in 2024, the couple planned it out together. They
would put their 2025 wet bean income into a fermentary, sell
dry bean at a better price, and fund his studies from the
difference. By the end of 2025, they had raised the fees. In
2026 he began a Bachelor in Teaching, Arts and Business
Studies at the University of Goroka. He took his GALS
booklet with him.
Angela also used the exercise in her
own household. After the 2024 training, she mentored her
children, and they used the Vision Journey to plan and start
an inland fish project. Water was the obstacle. They set a
target, a water pump, and bought it by mid-2025. When the
plan worked, they used the same approach again, adding
broilers and expanding their cocoa.
What carries the
work past the Programme is that Angela has not kept it to
herself. She has trained about 20 Community Gender Advocates
across the four LLGs of Wosera-Gawi, and they reach
communities she cannot personally visit. One, Julie
Kleniaka, leads the Wingum Women’s Group in Patiko
village. Another, Jude Wapi at Baluwe in the Chambri Lakes,
helped his community turn cocoa seedling sales into an early
childhood classroom, finished in 2024. “Government
officers [and local trainers] are full time on the ground
and will be in a better position to carry the activities
through,” Angela says, “at the same time mentoring
others to carry on further.”
Now she wants the
structure made permanent. At the regional consultation on
the National Women and Youth in Agriculture Policy in Wewak,
supported by the EU-STREIT PNG Programme, she proposed
creating funded gender desks in provincial and district
agriculture offices: a clear place for women and youth
farmers to seek gender-responsive extension and to connect
with markets, processing, banking, and finance. The
advocates are already working. A funded desk would give that
work a formal place inside the local agriculture
system.
But Angela is clear that the work is far from
finished. She points to illiteracy, to land and credit that
women struggle to reach, to limited business skills, and to
law-and-order problems that make it unsafe for a woman to
travel for help. Even with these challenges, Angela has seen
women gain confidence. “Many women couldn’t come out to
the front,” she says. “Many women cannot stand out in
public. Many women did not feel confidence in themselves.
Many women were pushed back. But now, through this training,
they know they have a place.”
The Programme named
Angela a Champion for the Greater Sepik Region in 2024,
recognising her leadership and advocacy for women farmers.
But by then, the work had already stopped being a project
activity. It had become the way she does her job. “It has
already become part of me,” she says. “It will just be
integrated and incorporated into any extension activity that
I conduct”.
She is still walking to the villages
that rarely see an officer. Asked what keeps her going, she
does not mention the recognition, or the policy. “There
are people out there that need me,” she says. “That is
what keeps me going.”
Angela is one of many
government officers whose capacities the EU-STREIT PNG
Programme has built across different sectors. Like her, they
are now applying what they gained in their own areas of
work.
About the EU-STREIT PNG Programme
The
EU-STREIT PNG Programme is the European Union’s largest
grant-funded initiative under the EU Global Gateway Strategy
in Papua New Guinea. It is implemented as a United Nations
Joint Programme led by FAO in partnership with ILO, ITU,
UNCDF and UNDP. It focuses on boosting sustainable,
inclusive rural development by enhancing returns and
opportunities in the cocoa, vanilla and fisheries value
chains (FAO). It also strengthens key enablers: digital
inclusion (ITU and FAO), digital financial services (UNCDF),
sustainable, climate-resilient transport infrastructure
(ILO), and renewable-energy solutions (UNDP and FAO). The
Programme directly benefits the East and West Sepik
Provinces.
