Towering over the small island of Adonara in Indonesia, the Ile Boleng volcano is always present in the background. In the nearby village of Adobala, I listened as female heads of households, dressed in sarungs, talked about how they had organised themselves as a women’s group in the local cooperative ‘Lodan Do’e’. The cheerful women didn’t just use the time to talk, but also to weave and make threads or cook coconut oil.
Lodan Do’e is part of the Indonesia-wide PEKKA movement. Since 2001, Perempuan Kepala Keluarga (Women-Headed Household Empowerment, also known as PEKKA) has been addressing the social and economic exclusion of female heads of households in Indonesia. Indonesian marriage law states that household heads are male, and does not recognise women in the role, referring to them in the Bahasa language as janda – a negative, dismissive term referring to widowed or abandoned women.