Directors of the Simberi Mining Area Association (SMAA) and Simberi Mine Service (SMS) recently completed a week-long training on the Introduction to Principles of Board Directorship, Good Governance and Corporate Risk Management conducted by the Papua New Guinea Human Resources Institute. The training is a tailored non-assessable training that gives them an understanding of the corporate management and leadership approaches to address their issues and manage their businesses and association. This training was funded by the Simberi Gold Mine Limited (SGCL) to provide capacity building to improve and promote good governance and leadership for the directors to manage their own affairs. The SGCL sees this as an opportunity to further support and work with landowners to effectively operate their organizations for all stakeholders’ benefit. In addition, the avenue provided by SGCL, represents the company’s commitment to building stronger communities and empowering people in diverse teams. The training covered important areas of general board matters, structures, ethics, directorship principles and financial governance, which will facilitate the directors in understanding their accountability in the leadership of the landowner association and umbrella company. Meanwhile, speaking on behalf of the participants, Pius Vaket from the Sitsoim Clan stated that the training was an effective tool, and the content was delivered to their level of understanding at a time when they needed to resolve pressing matters within their management. He said due to lack of knowledge in understanding good leadership and governance their overall progress to achieve better outcomes has been negatively affected. Furthermore, that it was a strategic time to reconnect and realign all the different stakeholders’ intent and aspirations with the Memorandum of Agreement and make the association active, so that it can serve its purpose and the interest of the communities and its stakeholders. “Many landowner groups face issues arising from poor governance and with that SMAA plans to have further meetings in the coming weeks with the five different stakeholders included in the MOA to find a set of resolution for the landowners and the company.”