Provincial health authorities get a total of K1bil annually, says MP Kapavore

By DANIEL EALEDONA
APART from funding given for provincial and rural development, provincial health authorities also get about K1 billion funding for health project developments, a member of parliament says.
Speaking at the Department of Implementation and Rural Development, digital Bilum platform launching yesterday, Pomio MP Elias Kapavore said: “Massive amounts of money go to sub-national governments to meet the development needs of districts and provinces and that’s apart from funding given like the Provincial Health Authority (PHA) funding which adds up to K900 million to K1 billion annually.
“ I’m speaking as the parliamentary chairman of Health in this instance.
“Development challenges faced in rural areas is not always lack of money. There is lack of implementation, monitoring , accountability and keeping our records and data that should tell us if we are doing the right things or not.
“I’m from one of the remotest districts in East New Britain. Nearly 80 per cent of the provinces land mass in my district.
“We are cut off from roads to Kokopo and just how do we provide services for those remote areas?”
Kapavore, acknowledged the government’s initiative to prioritise development at the rural level.
He said: “Districts are given funding no one district is left aside, the Department of Implementation and Rural Development’s drive to set up the service improvement programme (SIP) and the Distric Information Management System (DIMS) Bilum digital platform is a progressive move in today’s technology era.
“Now it is us the districts that have to provide all our acquittals and start moving from manually having paper reports to uploading our district information on the internet Bilum cloud platform.
“Having such access to live data feed would enable us to fund impact development projects and through the online submission of transparent reports and data, we can follow the progress of development projects in rural areas.