NCD Governor Powes Parkop has called on all the state agencies and enterprises to mobilize and join the End Violence Against Women Walk on the 30th of November 2025.
He made this call while addressing the importance of the 20 days human rights activist program that will take place from the 20 November to 10 December.
Mr Parkop said it was important for government agencies to come together and support the annual program.
These announcements were made in the presence of departmental secretaries for the government, staffs as well as representatives from development partners such as UN.
The governor also called for the Government and state agencies to sign a pledge to end Gender Based Violence and zero-tolerance of violence within their work places.
“I want to get all the government agencies to come together and work as a team to address this human rights and development issues that have been prevalent in our country up till now,” Mr Parkop said.
“Given the statics of having about 3million women and girls in our country being victims of gender based violence, the challenge now is for us to take action that is, for us to find solutions now to stop Gender based violence in our country.
“And so I am calling on all government agencies, state owned enterprises and development partners to mobilize and be part of the plans that we have for the 20days, but more importantly to collaborate into to advocate strongly on the human rights activist program into the future.
“The statics show that the situation now is going up despite, the resource, time and energy we put into addressing gender based violence including the continuous support from our development partners such as the United nations and the European Union. “Development partners have given us a lot of support, however the prevalence of GBV keeps going up and even getting worse.
“GBV is affecting half of our population , but evenly is affecting all of us too, when it affects women and girls it affects our productivity in our respective departments as and our country’s economy as a whole.
“To address this, the government has come up with the response and prevention strategy of GBV 2016 to 2025, however, we are not taking ownership of it in our work places , into our departments and into our state agencies to actually implement it.”
Secretary for National Planning Koney Samuel added: “GBV is a development issue and it is our collective effort to work together from a whole of government approach along with our development partners like the UN , UNDP, and particularly the Public Service to coordinate this activity because it will have an impact on the productivity of the public service in the country.
“It is very important to address this issue as it is part of the hard reset PNG initiative to get this issue sorted out and find some clear solutions going forward the next 50 years.”