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“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.
