Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a mountainous and mostly inaccesible country consisting of a group of islands situated at the western rim of the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Asia.

The largest of these islands, New Guinea, is divided between Indonesian West Papua and the state of Papua New Guinea.

Independent from Australia since 1975, PNG is a large country with a population of under six million, where 80% live in rural, inacessable areas with little or no public services.

With the monsoon season lasting for around four months each year, seasonal water shortages are commonplace. Periodically the country also suffers from severe droughts caused by the El Nino effect, the last one being in 1998.

Access to clean drinking water is an issue for over half of the population and there are large disparities between water and sanitation provision throughout the country.

One of our newest country programmes, WaterAid started work in PNG during 2005 .

Latrine moulds being prepared at Shiave Primary School in the Eastern Highlands.

Credit: Oxfam NZ

PNG faces many development challenges. The majority of the 5.6 million people of PNG live in small remote communities with limited or no road access and low education levels, and suffer many preventable diseases such as diarrhoea. They rely on subsistence farming and just over a third of the population have access to an improved water supply and not many more have access to any form of sanitation.

Access to clean drinking water is an issue for over half of the population and there are large disparities between water and sanitation provision throughout the country.

The WaterAid program in PNG continues to consolidate our work with local partners to provide access to improved water, sanitation and hygiene education. Our program has supported ATprojects for the fifth successful year. ATprojects is a local appropriate technology NGO that works in the Eastern Highlands of PNG.  2008 areas of work included the provision of WASH in seven primary schools, incorporating three very remote schools, as well as continuing the promotion of a simple round latrine slab for use by individual rural households. This year also included research into the issue of girls leaving school because of the stigma and humiliation associated with menstruation. This research has resulted in the development of appropriate female-friendly sanitation facilities to encourage girls to stay at school, which of course brings a great many benefits not only to the girls, but to their future family’s health and the community as a whole.  We also recruited a new Water and Sanitation Engineer in 2008.

WaterAid started a new initiative with ATprojects to develop two films, one on Sanitation and one on Water. These films and accompanying radio programs will be valuable tools to share simple technologies that communities can utilise, and will reinforce key messages about the importance of improved water, hygiene (such as hand washing), and the use of toilets.

We also undertook a WASH workshop with another local NGO, Bismarck Ramu Group in Madang province. This workshop is one of our initial activities together as we begin to build our partnership to implement WASH projects.

WaterAid has also continued its support of Oxfam PNG’s village water and sanitation program in Simbu, Southern Highlands and Bougainville provinces.

In 2008, working directly with local NGO HELP

Villager inspects new latrine

Credit: WaterAid/Wheen

The total program expenditure on the WaterAid PNG Country Program in 2008 was $247,085 with 15,175 water beneficiaries and 4,330 sanitation beneficiaries.