A little over K400,000 will be needed to roll the National Identification registration exercise in Rigo District, Central Province.
This was the figure shared by the District Development Authority following a recent signing of the Memorandum of Understanding with the PNG Civil Identity & Registration office.
Deputy Registrar Salome Bogasia sat with members of the Rigo DDA and local MP Lekwa Gure to formalise the understanding on Monday.
District CEO Koru Abe said: “We went through the MoU and did the costings. Over a period of three years we will need over K400,000, most of which will go to (logistics).”
Local MP Lekwa Gure said they did include the NID registration in their 5-year development plan, and while they have a number of priority areas, NID registration will have to be supported as well.
“The real challenge of this exercise is what’s going to happen going into the future when the population increases. The NID card is not unique to PNG, but vital still in accessing services.”
Deputy Registrar Bogasia said the MoU has been left open for 6 months to negotiation of its duration, which currently says three years for implementation.
She also said the present challenge is funding to buy equipment and arrange logistics to reach the rural majority.
“With the limited number of resources we have, we calculated it down to say, if we do four mobile kits in Rigo, for 270 to 300 thousand population, we could complete in roughly seven-and-a-half to eight months, supposing we had all the funding available and all the conditions are right to enable our teams to go into full mode.
“One hundred registrations a day per mobile kit. But that’s not to say we will do it in 7 to 8 months. It could be much longer than that.”
Rigo District is the fourteenth district to sign on, and the first in the Southern Region and the Central Province.