PAPUA New Guinea has made progress in recent years addressing some of our health challenges but accessing quality services in both urban and rural communities continues to dog authorities.
Tackling malaria – a killer disease which five years ago affected one in every five in PNG – was a major achievement when it was brought down to two in every 100. The World Health Organisation (WHO) attributed the drop to global and regional efforts as well as increased funding.
THESE days, major governments and international organisations issue many country reports and rankings. These report cover things such as the “ease
of doing business” in countries, media freedom, religious freedom, human development indicators, trafficking in persons, money laundering and more. Many of these are issued on an annual basis and require engagement of each country being evaluated. Often, a poor ranking can negatively affect a country — either in the media with negative publicity, or in access to future donor support.
This is why we’d like to commend the Office of Commerce and Investment (OCI) for hosting meetings of government ministry and agency representatives and for mayors to review the World Bank’s Doing Business report 2015 on the Marshall Islands. In our admittedly limited knowledge, we think this is the only time since the Marshalls was on a global money laundering blacklist in the late 1990s that an inter-agency group was pulled together to review an international report about the RMI with the goal of addressing deficiencies to improve the Marshall Islands’ ranking.