District spends on local businesses

National

By DALE LUMA
ALMOST 99 per cent of Alotau’s district services improvement programme (DSIP) funds have been transferred to local businesses for infrastructure development, MP Charles Abel says.
In an interview with The National, Abel said infrastructure was the biggest area which the district’s funds were spent on last year.
Most of the money was spent on local contractors.
“We use a lot of our local contractors, whether it be for equipment hires, small contracts or labour, a lot of the money went into the local businesses,” he said.
“We try to use them as much as possible.
“That is one of the good things about DSIP because it funds a lot of our local businesses to do all this work.
“You have the main hardware and so on but contractors are the local people who are the plumbers and carpenters in the village.
“This is money that filters into the community.
“If you see many of the local projects, for example building a water supply in the village, it’s the local boys that are benefiting from the rations and the bit of money because they are the ones that are building.
“We just bring the contractors and tell them how to dig and so on because that’s how we make the money go further.
“If we get a big contractor, they will use the money very quickly so we spread it and get our local project officers to assist them.”
Abel said the district also had its own small and medium enterprise programme that it supported and ran, with funding allocations annually.