Papua New Guinea, through the Somare Institute of Leadership and Governance (SILAG) will now offer courses to public servants from the Pacific region who can be trained at the Institute.
Department of Personnel Management Secretary Taies Sansan said this after attending the 16th Pacific Public Service Commissioners Conference in Wellington, New Zealand held from November 13-16, 2023.
Ms Sansan highlighted the importance of training public servants in the region to better deliver services to our people.
“As the country in the region with a larger public service size, the challenges are there and the experiences shared by other countries including their challenges in managing their public services means that we all have to find the solutions within ourselves in the region.
“We have the Somare Institute of Leadership and Governance and we are open to receive public servants from the region to come and be trained at the Institution. What we need is for our development partners such as Australia and New Zealand to support us and fund these training programs for our public servants in Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia and the Small Island States”.
Secretary Sansan attended the 16th Pacific Public Services Commissioners Conference which was attended by 50 delegates from 16 countries including Papua New Guinea.
The first Pacific Public Services Commissioners Conference was held in 2004 and is an annual event that brings together 16 Pacific countries to discuss and find solutions to human resource issues in the public services of member countries.
The conference was not held for a few years due to the impact of COVID-19 and was revived and held this year.
The theme of the conference was “In Service of Country and People: Public Service leadership to meet the challenges of the region”.
“The 4-day Program was highly interactive, with key speakers consisting of Commissioner of New Zealand Public Service Commission, Peter Hughes and the Commissioner of Australian Public Service Commission, Dr Gordon de Brouwer who discussed the importance of integrity and ethics in the public service”.
Ms Sansan said, other topics of interest that were covered during this conference included; navigating adaptive workforce planning, transforming public service delivery for tomorrow, data to enable public service excellence, performance management and support for CEOs and agencies to deliver, and strategic communications.
As a board member of the Pacific Fale Governance Board, Secretary Sansan thanked the Board and the Conference for New Zealand and Australian Government’s assistance to PNG by delivering online programs and in person, such as training on Directors Courses, Mentoring programs, Workforce Planning and most importantly the assistance on the public sector reforms which saw the completion of the independent review conducted on the functions of Department of Personnel Management and Public Services Commission in 2022.
Samoa will be hosting the conference in 2024.