WHAT’S YOUR STORY?
Hi! I'm Samantha.
At 21, I started work in a Fiji newsroom with a secret. I was pregnant and kept it to myself until I’d finished probation.
I’d wanted to teach English, but my seventh form results fell two marks short. Two years later, my school friend Ana Tudrau-Tamani remembered how much I loved English and tipped me off about a reporting job. I started the week of the 2003 South Pacific Games. Within days, I had my first front-page story.
I later moved into development communications, drawing on my newsroom experience to help Pacific programmes explain their work.
Working on agricultural market access across six Pacific countries, I used storytelling to connect the experiences of Pacific farmers and buyers half a world away, showing how development support helped growers reach new markets and what that meant for their livelihoods.
At the Pacific Community, I spent almost five years working in human rights, gender and culture. I supported regional forums and worked with government counterparts to build their communications skills. Regional policies such as the Pacific Regional Culture Strategy and the Pacific Platform for Action on Gender Equality and Women’s Human Rights set out commitments across countries. The question that interests me is what people in their own communities have to say about progress on those commitments.
WHAT I DO
I’m a strategic communications consultant based in Fiji. I help Pacific organisations decide what they need to communicate, who they need to reach and what kind of product will best support the outcomes they hope to achieve.
My agricultural communications work ranged from field stories to briefings for ministerial visits. As lead for special projects at The Fiji Times, I shaped publications from the initial idea through commissioning and design to the final pages.
I like being involved while there’s still room to shape the idea. For the Triennial Conference of Pacific Women, I helped shape how the conference introduced its theme through video and designed materials for the event itself, including a life-size timeline tracing more than four decades of Pacific women’s regional advocacy.
That’s what I bring to a consultancy: the judgement to work out with your team what you want people to understand or act on, and the creative skills to find the right form for that idea and bring it to life in a way that gives people a compelling reason to act.
PROFESSIONAL RECOGNITION
· 2012 SeaWeb Journalist of the Year
· 2025 FAME Award Winner for Best Coverage of a Major News Event
