ORD ends highlands survey

By JAMES APA GUMUNO
THE Office of Rural Development (ORD) has completed collecting baseline data for the highlands region.
The district services improvement programme (DSIP) and district information management system (DIMS) fact finding mission had toured the region since October and completed its task on Wednesday in the
newly-created Hela province.
This leaves only East and West Sepik provinces yet to be covered.
The database information collected will not only support the DSIP implementation, but help the district and provincial administrators in their planning, design, prioritisation, and target their expenditures in a planned approach.
A team from ORD visited the region to find out why goods and services were not reaching the people, and what obstacles were causing this.
District improvement and rural development’s Kelly Lovuru said the database would be used by district administrators to plan and spend public money in the right places.
Lovuru said the challenge would be to update it annually and make it available to decision-makers to decide on priority projects to be funded in the national budget.
He said the DIMS would hold data on the profile of each district, DSIP and other projects that were implemented in the districts and register assets.