The East New Britain Provincial Administration and Government is currently reviewing and working on its ten-year Strategic Development Plan (SDP).
Its last ten-year plan from 2011-2021 has expired, therefore the Planning and Research Division is facilitating this exercise for all the sectors to come up with its new provincial SDP.
This is a development plan setting the development part forward for the province for the next ten years.
According to Deputy Administrator Social Services, Marakan Uvano, this new review plan contains the strategies, the vision and mission of the province directing the province where they want to go in the next ten years and how to get there.
He said these programs strategies and projects from this plan are the vehicles that will help to drive the province to its destiny.
“The exercise today is mainly to go through and revise those programs in each sector plus if there are policies that need to be done to help the province.”
“This is the third week of the exercise the officers are station in one place all the sectors have been required to provide information so that we inform this plan in terms of the current status, what were done over the last term of this plan, where we are and where we need to go starting from next year onwards.”
Uvano stated that they had a mid-term review in 2020 to check if most of the projects and the activities contained in the plan are on track.
This plan will go through the normal vetting process where it will go through the administration.
After the clearance and input is done from the administration through the Provincial Cooperate team, it will then go to the Provincial Executive Council (PEC) then to Assembly.
After its endorsement, it will become a policy of the government for the next ten years.
In addition, Uvano said in terms of the last plan, they have come to a milestone that some of the things they have achieved and those that they have not achieved will still be in the plan until it is achieved.
He added that they are hoping that by next month, September, they should have the document ready for launching.
Meanwhile, Research and Planning Advisor, Ludwick Ngori, said that the next mid-term review should be in 2027 which will be aligned to the Medium-Term Development Plan 4 and what they will be doing now is integrating the planning cycle with the electoral cycle.
He stated that they have new members coming in so they will need to align their plans with their political leadership.
Furthermore, Ngori said that the sectors are coming in now with their write ups about their current implementation status and the challenges.
“We are aligning these plans with MTDP 4 and by the end of the week we should have a draft ready for validation.”