Papua New Guinea

PNG's progress towards achieving the goals:

Goal one: ERADICATE POVERTY AND HUNGER

In spite of the government's emphasis on poverty reduction in recent years, the proportion of people under the national poverty line has not changed significantly in the last two decades. About 30 percent of households live below the poverty line.

Only a small proportion of the labour force in the rural sector is engaged in the cash economy. Unemployment and underemployment in the urban sector is high, especially for those aged 15 - 24 years. Disparities in income are significant, with marked differences in development between rural and urban areas and malnutrition high in some areas.

Bearing in mind that PNG’s development record in the past two decades has been mixed and that the country faces many challenges, it is unlikely that the very demanding global target of reducing poverty by 50 per cent can be achieved in PNG by 2015. The country needs significant economic growth (higher than the current 2.8 percent per annum) to lift the population out of poverty.

Progress towards getting all children into primary school was significant in the years after independence but has started to slow down recently. Primary school enrolment and retention rates are still very low in PNG. In fact, primary retention rates have decreased since 1995, especially in The Highlands provinces.

The level of adult literacy, which may be considered as a measure of achievement in education, has gradually improved in the 1980s and 1990s but is still very low.

Given the large number of children reaching school age each year, demands on school resources are enormous. It is difficult for the government to keep up with the demand for new schools and train enough teachers.

In some ethnic groups, girls are traditionally kept at home and this impacts on primary enrolment rates significantly.

The PNG government considers the global target of achieving close to 100 percent enrolment and retention by 2015, as unrealistic.

Gender inequality in PNG is significant in some parts of the country. Women in PNG are less likely to be in paid employment, more likely to suffer violence and poor health, and less likely to be able to read or have gone to school than men. Women are also at greater risk than men in PNG from the country's HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the coming years the enrolment and retention rates of girls will be far more affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic than those for boys.

PNG is a signatory to a number of international conventions that support gender equity and empowerment of women, particularly the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). These have been translated into national policies, strategies and laws. However, their implementation continues to remain difficult.

Traditional social and cultural attitudes hamper the achievement of gender equality. The global target with regards to gender equality and empowerment of women may not be achievable by 2015, but it should be possible to make significant progress towards achieving the tailored national targets that have been adopted and incorporated in the MTDS. The government aims at eliminating gender disparity at the primary and lower secondary level by 2015 and at the upper secondary level and above by 2030.

Goal four: REDUCE CHILD MORTALITY

As late as the 1960s, the national average life expectancy at birth was only about 40 years and the infant and child mortality rate 134 per thousand in PNG. Infant and child mortality started to come down in the 1970s, but progress has slowed considerably in recent years.

Some provinces in PNG continue to have very high Infant Mortality Rates of more than 100 per 1000 live births - but there are huge disparities in these numbers.

Health services, mother and child healthcare (MCH), reproductive health, immunization, preventable diseases, the security situation and the lack of basic infrastructure in some provinces need to be addressed in order to close the large gaps in child mortality.

In view of the already stagnating mortality indices and the enormous new challenges PNG is facing, especially the threat of HIV/AIDS, it is highly unlikely that the global target of reducing child mortality by two thirds can be achieved by 2015.

Although accurate numbers are not available (the most recent figure comes from 1984), the national average Maternal Mortality Ratio of an estimated 370 per 100,000 live births, is very high.

It is assumed that maternal mortality followed a similar trend to infant mortality and overall female mortality, and has not changed significantly in recent years.

The proportion of pregnant women giving birth under medically supervised conditions is very low and has decreased even further in recent years. These are important determinants of maternal (as well as infant) mortality.

The extremely large reduction of 75 percent in maternal mortality by 2015, envisaged under MDG 5 is generally considered as highly unlikely to occur in PNG.

A far more modest national target may be achievable if some drastic and urgent improvements are made in a number of critical areas, especially ANC attendance, supervised delivery or more generally reproductive health and family planning.

Since the early 1990s, the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS has increased exponentially. In 2002, PNG became the fourth country in the Asia-Pacific Region (after Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar) to have a generalized HIV epidemic, when the prevalence of HIV in the Port Moresby General Hospital among antenatal women reached one percent. At the end of 2003, the number of recorded cases was 8,918.

The country suffers from very limited surveillance capacity, so it is thought that the number of recorded cases represents only a small proportion of those infected.

If the current annual rate of increase of recorded cases in PNG of approximately 33 per cent per year continues, the number of recorded cases would be close to half a million by 2015. This is about seven percent of the projected population for 2015. HIV/AIDS has become a destabilizing factor of the first order and the single most important challenge for development in PNG as well as for the achievement of the MDGs.

TB and pneumonia also have high prevalence rates, and are often associated with HIV infection, however, the recorded cases of malaria still pose by far the heaviest burden of disease in PNG.

Papua New Guinea is a country rich in natural resources, including gold, copper, oil, gas, timber and fisheries. Its economic exclusion zone of 3.1 million square kilometers is host to an abundant tuna resource and marine fisheries. The country’s tropical rainforest is the third largest in the world and is characterized by extraordinary biodiversity (more than five per cent of the world’s total). Thirty per cent of the country’s land mass is suitable for agriculture and the soils are generally fertile, with the climate and rainfall sufficient to support a wide range of crops for domestic consumption and export.

However, the continued exploitation of these resources is occurring. Deforestation is a serious threat to livelihoods, although the deforestation rate is now lower than in the peak logging years of the mid-1990s.

Present estimates of the annual loss of forest areas still range from 120,000 to 200,000 hectares. In the foreseeable future, most deforestation may well come from clearing for agricultural use, due to the high population growth rate and the very large proportion of the population dependent for their livelihood on subsistence farming.

A large percentage of the total land area of PNG is already subjected to strong or severe erosion. An equally large proportion is permanently inundated or regularly flooded.

In rural areas only about nine percent of the households have access to piped water and only 2.5 percent have their own or a shared flush toilet and 16 per cent have no toilet facility at all.

Most global targets with regards to environmental sustainability are very vague and need to be defined more precisely. Attempts have been made to replace these global targets with more meaningful and precise national targets