Shortage of Onions in Papua New Guinea???? Whaaaaatttt????

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Allow me to share an agony that expats here in Papua New Guinea, specifically in the central city of Port Moresby, whose been enduring for nearly a month the shortage, or more appropriate to state as nowhere to be found‘onions’ and ‘calamansi’ in all supermarkets as well as in wet and dry markets all over the city. Nothing on a similar plight have had happened before, and so we are all caught off guard. Due to desperation, my husband asked a Papua New Guinean colleague to buy us onions on their local village market outside Port Moresby, and it costed us P64.00 per piece!!!

Only expatriates have been buzzing dramatically about the shortage in onions, as Papua New Guineans are not really into cooking. While us Filipinos, are lamenting badly especially my kids frown emoticon, about the non-existence of both ‘onions’ and ‘calamansi’ in our daily comfort Filipino dishes.

In conferment to the given explanations found in Expatriates Association of Port Moresby facebook page, it was said that the ban on the import of fruits and vegetables is beginning to take a visible effect. Lae Chamber of Commerce officer Allan McLay, however rooted the shortage to drought that has affected production of vegetables in the Highlands (vegetable production capital city) and other parts of the country. Others entrenched it to frost that has been badly hitting the vegetable production provinces, likewise.

Drought, frost, temperature rise, forest fire, super typhoons, it is binding and evident that CLIMATE CHANGE is happening NOW!

With that premise, I devise a simple development communication plan for CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION

Message Sources 
Climatic data and forecasts will be originated from the Meteorological Department and other government authorities, government research institutes, also from the universities and scholars doing studies on climate change and adaptation. Other pertinent information may also be gathered from the mass media.

Localised Messages 
Messages have to be laymanised, localised and translated into climatic information, agricultural knowledge model and advisory services significant to the needs of the local community.

Channels
Once message is transformed into understandable forms, they can be shared using a unification of folk media, interpersonal and mediated communication including local information outlets such as the pharmacies and village markets, use of ICTs, film, mobile van, etc.

Community Participatory Learning 
The heart of the matter lies in being able to integrate these different channels and messages into a hub of participatory community learning to build a community of learners on livelihood adaptation to climate change.

Desired Outcomes
Improved adaptive capacity leads to a successful livelihood adaptation options.

Furthermore, a development communication plan should be linked to the national and regional levels for sources of messages and for mainstreaming objectives. Nonetheless, PLANNING is one thing, but IMPLEMENTATION is another thing. The government must reinforce all its agencies and resources to contrive plan, strategies and implementation to mitigate, if not to curb the devastating effects of climate change. I strongly suggest that every government of every nation should put up a National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility that will synthesise the best available adaptation research and produce practical, hands-on tools and information for local decision-makers, particularly in the coastal zone.

And so expectantly, in the next few days, along with a better configured development plan of the Papua New Guinea government, I am hopeful to reconnect and cook our native ‘bistek’ again. Crossed-finger!

READINGS:

http://www.looppng-sb.com/.../review-decision-ban-fresh...
https://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/adaptation

The Essentiality of Communication Planning

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Planning, in accordance to Community Tool Box Website (ctb.ku.edu), is a manner to organize behaviours for the fulfilment of specific goal/s. Our goal as development communicators is to raise awareness in line with our initiative's long-term benefits towards our community.

To develop a plan of communication for development, we have to consider some basic questions (Section 1. Developing a Plan for Communication):

• Why do we want to communicate with the community? (What’s our purpose?)
• Whom do we want to communicate it to? (Who’s our audience?)
• What do we want to communicate? (What’s our message?)
• How do we want to communicate it? (What communication channels are we going to use?)
• Whom should we contact and what should we do in order to use those channels? (How will we actually distribute your message?)

The answers to these pertinent inquiries establish our action plan and what are we needed to do in order to communicate strongly with our audience. The rest of our development communication plan involves three steps:

• Implement our action plan. Construct the message and distribute it to the target audience.
• Evaluate our communication efforts, and fine-tune our plan accordingly.
• Keep at it

Communication is continuous activity for development planners like us, which depends upon, serves, or is in some way associated with the community. The audience, purpose, channels, and message may alter, but the commitment to maintain relationships with key people and the media in the community continue. As a result, an essential part of any development communication plan is to continue using and revising our plan, based on our experience, throughout the existence of our development goals.

Goodnight! And thank you for reading.



Reference
Section 1. Developing a Plan for Communication. (n.d.). Retrieved November 5, 2015, from Community Tool Box: http://ctb.ku.edu/

How ICT Impacts An Effective Development Communication Plan

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For those who are not familiar with Papua New Guinea (PNG), where I’ve excogitated my communication plan output, please allow me to share some facts that will clearly reverberate why communication plan is a challenge in this nation. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a country in the Pacific close to North Australia state of Cairns (an hour plane away) to be categorical, with around 8million people. Essentially, this is a middle income country because of its vast mineral wealth, however, very distant to what is the outstanding economic ascendancy of the Philippines; In a statement made by Australian government, PNG is: 

“Despite positive economic growth rates in recent years, PNG’s social indicators are among the worst in the Asia Pacific. Approximately 85 percent of PNG’s mainly rural population is poor and an estimated 18 percent of people are extremely poor. Many lack access to basic services or transport. Poverty, unemployment and poor governance contribute to serious law and order problems.”

Amongst other things, Papua New Guinea faces unique circumstances associated to remoteness; with a landmass nearly size as massive as California, PNG has 562 airports, with over 800 spoken languages, and the most linguistically diverse country in the world. In addition, literacy rate is less than 60%, and ranks 156th on the Human Development Index (SOURCE: Australian government). Discernibly, not good figures from a perspective of development agents such as ourselves.

With these given difficulties, communication plan is glaring to be a struggle for development planners. Nevertheless, with problems of these sort, information and communication technology in the outside world continues to proliferate by which luckily, is slowly infiltrating the telecommunication industry of Papua New Guinea. Network signal has been reaching the widest coverage plus escalating number of mobile subscribers. Thus, development planners are taking advantage of this advancement, on which they utilise these technologies and came up with a communication plan that will teach the teachers on how they will better equip themselves in teaching phonics and reading to young disenfranchised unable to read grade 1 and 2 students, living in the remotest parts of Papua New Guinea. It is extremely moving and inspiring, how the development planners meticulously devise ways and means in reaching out to the teachers, and ensuring that the communication plans are religiously carried-out on a daily basis. Hence, a technological approach to communication planning.

Attempts have been made to codify a close to perfect communication plan. However, apart from creativity, technology, and highly flexible mindset of the planners, it is worth to mention that longevity must likewise be considered. For a valuable long-term plan results are achieved by the systematic examination of alternative likely futures, based on combinations of identified trends and possible events. In other words, instead of attempting to predict a single unique future, communication planners must analyse uncertain future events to gain an understanding of the implication of a particular circumstance, or set of circumstances. In this way an organization improves its capacity to deal with change by being able to identify new emergencies and opportunities at the time they start to appear on the futures horizon, and plan accordingly. Hence, a futuristic system of communication planning.