“Me and my wife share ideas and dreams. We have a plan now to have a good house. It took a long time to come to this. Now we have our permanent house. During [training] we sat together and had two visions – the first is to put our kids in school, and this is happening as my first son is in secondary. The second was to have our permanent house, and this has also happened.”
That's how people in Papua New Guinea are making dreams come true – by sharing those dreams. That's between men and women, between governments and citizens, and between companies and clients. CARE Papua New Guinea reviewed its programming since 2009 to see what impacts they’ve had. Here’s what they found.
What did we accomplish?
- Kids go to school: 7,681 kids had access to school through CARE programs.
- People got help in emergencies: 328,224 people benefitted from El Nino drought response.
- Communities are healthier: 24,000 people got maternal/family health services, and 123,000 people benefitted from improved health services. Community health volunteers continued to work after projects were over, ensuring longer-lasting impacts.
- Women have more access to information: The percent of women who participated in agricultural extension training went from 10% to 53%. Private sector companies even changed the way they host trainings to make sure women could participate.
- Governments are more inclusive: CARE helped establish Village Courts in 8 communities that had never had access to the justice system before. They also helped local governments roll out gender-inclusive manuals and tools, and got more people involved in local planning processes.
- Communities are more resilient: CARE worked with governments to build 7 bridges that serve as evacuation routes during floods, which benefit 17,975 people. The government of PNG even contributed $951,672 to local infrastructure to promote resilience.
How did we get there?
- Work with partners: CARE worked with local governments, community groups, and private sector companies to set priorities and plan for change at scale.
- Focus on governance: CARE PNG built on CARE’s governance framework, supported training for local officials, and created spaces for communities to implement government policies. CARE helped 160 communities set up Ward Development Communities so people could participate in government planning and accountability.
- Provide resources: CARE helped local government invest in completing schools and health clinics that the national government had started. We also supported travel costs so government officials could visit remote and hard-to-reach constituents communities.
- Go deep on gender expertise: CARE focused on women’s leadership, adopted approaches to address social norms, and concentrated on investing in integration of gender expertise across programs. That made it easier for CARE to be a credible advisor on gender and convince others to change.
- Work with the most vulnerable: CARE worked with some of the most remote communities, since that’s a key factor in vulnerability in PNG. We also worked on emergency response to help those who were most in need.
- Learn and adapt: CARE’s adaptive learning approach to change based on program and context data helped us continually improve our programming and partnerships with others.
Want to learn more?
Check out the evaluation.