Comments

Hi Alyssa Great analysis on the national development particularly the Connect PNG initiative by the Government. I think if the Government wants to see drastic improvement and progress in the project they ought to increase the funding capacity and also fulfill their commitment of the 5.6% mentioned.

I feel it's really important projects, so I wanted to be up to date with the day to day progresses.

I am applaud of the conditions that are present in our society and our so call Country of our people who have been bought over from Vanuatu to make a living for their families back home and they have been given a choice between being in their homes or living abroad to live here for their own sake in order to support themselves and others to make a difference for themselves. Unfortunately this so call Scheme that the Government has is disgusting and Foreigner Affairs allows them to bring majority of slave labour into this state and other areas! The living conditions of these poor people are sharing a 3 to 4 bedroom house with 21 adults and majority of them aren’t even getting paid enough to cover rent, food etc ! Shame on the government, contractors or whoever! God help you all

This whining about being subcontractors has been going on for decades. There is actually no easy solution. Donors need financial and M&E reporting to the standard demanded of those who give them funds (ultimately taxpayers), which most Myanmar NGOs/CSOs cannot do. We, Mekong Economics, play a linking role - we did over 200 third-party monitoring missions for UNICEF last year. Two solutions: Explicitly label Myanmar a "failed state" and change reporting requirements to make direct LNGO/CSO funding possible; Two: change the present "7% add on for administration costs" allowed by LIFT and INGOs for local NGOs/CSOs. It means they never have capacity to do anything. Increase it to 30% (also for direct funding). That gives them funds to improve reporting, train staff, and even fund their own initiatives.

Well may you say the "development sector needs to learn how to shout “show me the money!” I'd prefer to shout "show me the results" - the demonstrable impacts of our aid Budgets. Not "inputs" like "money" - those expenditures should eventually be resulting in outputs benefitting the poor of our world. Please. FOR EXAMPLE - In 1990, 40,000 children under 5 died each day from preventable causes. It's since been reduced to 13,800 each day in 2021. As UNICEF has recorded: "The world made remarkable progress in child survival in the past three decades, and millions of children have better survival chances than in 1990—1 in 26 children died before reaching age five in 2021, compared to 1 in 11 in 1990. Moreover, progress in reducing child mortality rates has been accelerated in the 2000s period compared with the 1990s, with the annual rate of reduction in the global under-five mortality rate increasing from 1.8 per cent in 1990s to 4.0 per cent for 2000-2009 and 2.7 per cent for 2010-2021." What's been Australia's contributions then, to these significant results ?

Great work Ben! "Show me the money", and where it's spent, and on what. It is possible that aligning development with the national interest can be good practice. Equally it can divert attention from other pressing development priorities.

Hi Ema Finau. Very interesting. Will be in touch re: a CLA response. David

Great Insightful Thought Mr Kaiku. I was just contemplating on the NGDP's strategy of which you have clearly stated in the article. However the Directive Principles component of this bigger concept that was constituted by the founding fathers of this nation was basically based on the ethical values that governed our societies back then. Justice and respect was paramount, thus contributed to the upbringing of this nation. Hence, this is not the case nowadays; what is the missing link? How is the system operating nowadays in this globalization post-modernism era? What contributes to the fading away of our traditional ethical values that protects the sovereignty of our people? Therefore is there any possibilities to contextualize the system by merging our traditional ethical values which our fore fathers made application to the constitution back than and make it relevant to this present age. By saying all this I see that our Melanesian way of life does have a great value towards the integral development our people. Hence, definitely we are pragmatic people therefore we can see it has an advantage to formulate ideas and see instant result that can solve problems in the lives of the people holistically. I do not intend to put my thoughts into what you have mentioned and bring us back to the past. But I believe that our way forward to bring about change is to really consider our home-grown ethical values rather than abstracting ideas elsewhere that does not suite our context to govern our society.

Mr Kaiku this is an excellent piece of advise worth considering by our Government and development partners. I believe that the five national goals and directive principles were divinely inspired by God to our forefathers who wrote the preamble of our National Constitution. The Five National Goals & Directives Principles were comprehensive and whole inclusive of what national development challenges were ahead of their time. They are relevant to our present time. It is therefore incumbent upon the current Government or any future Governments to annually review and reprioritize our current development trajectory based on these important directives and guidelines. I applaud the author of this paper who outlined the importance of the five NG & DP and their need to be made relevant again. The main challenge now is the rapid phase of globalization that is somewhat impeding our national goals - to become globally relevant while keeping PNG ways and traditions. There are other challenges such as the introduction of big data or the internet of ways and AIs which places our national goals and directive principles to meet the needs and requirements on how we fair as a independent sovereign state but at the same time become an effective member of the global community of nations. Overall, the writers call is a timely reminder to all Papua New Guineans to become active participants of nation building so that collectively we build a stronger, prosperous, wiser and smarter nation.

Thanks Minister for emphasising that Australia's development policy now is to include: "stronger monitoring, evaluation and learning". Given that the Australian Centre for Evaluation is now being developed in Treasury, how will you embed the on-going practice of evaluation in DFAT and our development policy? There is a significant difference between "implement" and "embed", especially if you plan to increase public support for our aid by highlighting the results from it.

Well synthesized

A good piece, tankyu tumas Kiery for this analysis.