Secretary for the Department of National Planning and Monitoring, Koney Samuel thanked the UN Country Team (UNCT) and partners for participating at the UN Strategic Prioritization and Theory of Change Workshop this week.
Secretary Koney said this workshop was timely for the Government and the development partners to agree on consolidating government priorities in the Medium-Term Development Plan IV (2023-2027) to Development Partners respective Country Assistance Strategies.
“The alignment by our development partners to the strategic priorities of National Government is very critical for us to collectively deliver to the people of this country. We are operating in a fiscally constrained environment compounded by myriad of other development challenges that continue to hamper our progress as a nation.
“Financing gaps, lack of institutional capacities, political instability, high unemployment rate, increasing law and order problems and poor governance, accountability and transparency, obviously remain our biggest development bottlenecks that we undeniably need the support of all our development partners to address these bottlenecks successfully,” the secretary said. “Only then we can accelerate economic growth and development at a faster rate.”
While appreciating long term development partners who have been in the country since independence 47 years ago, he views that they would do their own stock take and quantify on some of the key projects that they’ve all delivered in the country. By doing that they will have real sense of appreciation of the impact they had created in the country.
“The Government of Papua New Guinea highly values the contribution of each and every partner in this group.”