Govt raises church funding to K155 million

By MICHAEL LAI
The Government will allocate K155 million to churches for their programmes next year, according to Minister for Youth, Religion and Community Development Soroi Eoe.
This is a big increase of K145 million from the current K10 million.
Eoe revealed this during the Church-State database information launch in Port Moresby yesterday.
“We thank the Government for setting the church-State partnership framework to fund it through an increased budget from K10 million to K155 million,” he said.
“The Government wants to honour the work of the churches though continued funding under the church-State partnership.
“Let me announce that I have confirmation from the Planning minister (Richard Maru) that he has allocated church partnership funds of K155 million for 2019 budget.”
Meanwhile, a database to record information on 21 churches and the services they provide in the country has been launched .
Eoe said the churches provided 46 per cent of health services and 50 per cent of education services.
“The database will keep records of the different churches, the number of health and education services the churches provide and their non-for-profit organisations,” he said.
Eoe said the Government had no database to quantify the development process and progress.
He said the establishment of church-State partnership and the database after two years was a milestone achievement.
“We need to coordinate the efforts in terms of data to effectively assist the churches,” Eoe said.
Office of Religion deputy secretary Warren Marape said the database would help churches and Government deliver services.
“The database will reliably inform us to review our partnership policy framework to be really inclusive of all the churches.”