Former Papua New Guinea cabinet minister from July 2007 shows Australian-born Dame Carol Kidu relaxing on the porch of her campaign headquarters in Pari village near Port Moresby. In March, 2007, Dame Carol was honoured with the US Secretary of State's International Woman of Courage Award for her promotion of human rights in PNG. Photo: AFP / Torsten Blackwood
Dame Carol Kidu, a pioneering woman in Papua New Guinea politics and outspoken advocate for violence against women, exited the political limelight 12 years ago.
She is the widow of Sir Buri Kidu, who became PNG's first chief justice in the 1990s, and for many years she was the Minister of Community Development, as well as the first female opposition leader, remaining the highest achieving woman in PNG's political landscape.
But since retiring in 2012, the Australia-born politician has embarked on a number of community driven projects.
Most recently, she has been overseeing the development of a small retreat, which will also be a workshop providing employment training.
"It's the hardest thing I've done. I think [it's] harder than politics trying to do a small business in a multicultural context," she told RNZ Pacific.
"But once I retired from politics, I knew that I had to think about a sustainable future for Sir Buri's family, so I decided to convert our home into a kind of a retreat."
With the future in mind Dame Carol used her retirement savings and what she inherited from her mother to start "family-focused" Tutu Beach Retreat.
"We only have four self contained rooms, and then we have a backpackers' style, and I'm hoping that I can build up that market a little bit because people are afraid to come to Papua New Guinea.
"We don't want the drunken type clientele from Port Moresby, we do get it sometimes. And yes, we take their money, but we prefer a family-focussed type of place where people can come and relax, unwind, enjoy."
Dame Carol Kidu reminds Pacific MPs of the Programme of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo 1994. Photo: RNZ/Daniela Maoate-Cox
Aside from the retreat, she is also creating a learning centre, which will be open for people with some degree of education attainment.
"The policy that I worked on when I was in politics, the Integrated Community Development Policy, which was based on community learning centres, and that I've been doing through donated funding, and some in from my personal money.
"Within this complex is a library, which we've had for quite a long time, but I've relocated now into a standalone building and then underneath the library will be a training centre for larger workshops and things."
The library is going to be used as a third flexible open distance education center which she is running in partnership with Kokoda Track Foundation, who run FODE [Flexible Open Distance Education] centres in the rural areas.
"I did try to do it earlier and it just became too difficult. It's really quite a complex road and it's part of the formal system of education.
Her effort to run open distance education centres were hailed by Prime Minister James Marape as "a solution to education in Papa New Guinea".
But Dame Carol said that was not the case as the centres only took people who had at least a grade 8 certificate.
"The others, no it doesn't take them in. They're part of the push outs of the country and then it doesn't take in people who have no education."
"So this centre aims to take in anyone who is reading and who wants to learn. That's our motto. If you're reading, you can come to our courses. It's good if they're literate for some courses."
