30 September (North Harbour) South Africa have a perfect rugby record against Samoa, but they won’t want to rest on their laurels for this match. Even if it’s an uphill battle, Samoa will be desperate to win, and perhaps if they manage to pull it off, that could be attributed to their advantage in equality. One of the biggest issues for this ma ...

25 September (Auckland) Fiji sent a Hail Mary Pass by Britain   Guest blog from Fr Denis O’Hagan, a Marist priest and one of the editors of the online e-newsletters  CathNews New Zealand and CathNews Pacific. I was delighted that Samoa beat Fiji on Sunday, because Samoa was my home for seven years. (Though I was on Fiji’s side when the ...

Wednesday 14 September (Rotorua) In the third match of Pool D, Namibia face their second Pacific island nation in a row. Ranking Samoa proved even harder than ranking Fiji and Tonga – there simply isn’t enough information available to make concrete judgements about inequality in the country. Nevertheless, we’ve given Samoa a very high rankin ...

Further to yesterday’s blog on New Zealand’s ranking – the Pacifica nations also probably rank higher than they should in our indicative rankings – we haven’t factored in gender inequality properly yet. The latest Human Development Report 2010 had no figures for the Gender Inequality Index for Tonga, Samoa and Fiji. Presumably ...