Caritas Australia & New Zealand funds Relief programs in PNG

A total of 336, 600 people from the severely affected areas during the Drought and Frost period will be beneficiaries of the Catholic Church of PNG Recovery Program.

General Secretary of Catholic Bishop Conference, Fr Victor Roche and Director of Caritas PNG Mr Raymond Tan today announced a K3.3 million funding through Caritas Australia & New Zealand to carry out a full scale Drought Relief Program in the six affected Highlands Provinces including Morobe and Western provinces.

“When the drought started affecting our people the Catholic Church quickly went in to action and we did assessments through our network to collect data on how many people and how many families were affected then went ahead to sought funding,” says Fr Roche.

According to the National Director of Caritas PNG Mr Raymond Ton they conducted a vigorous assessment into specific areas of the provinces and have identified families that are in real need for this program.

“With the help of our network partners the Relief and Recovery Plan will have two phases. One is the Relief Food Distribution that will take up to 4 weeks and the 2nd phase will be a 12 Month Recovery Program that will be conducted especially for the areas that we have identified,” says Mr Ton.

The Recovery Program will is consist of Safe & sustainable access to water, Health and Hygiene Awareness and Re-establish sustainable agriculture livelihood programs.

Some of the projects in the Program are 8 bore water systems have been identified for schools, hospitals and health centre with over 70, 000 beneficiaries of reticulated water systems, 53 trainings to be conducted on rehabilitating livelihoods while 11 nurseries for cash crop will be constructed for 20, 000 market gardens, re-establishment of 15 fish farms with 2, 000 families to receive farm animals. PNGFM