Project Yumi lends a hand

By JAMIE HARO
A NON-GOVERNMENTAL organisation (NGO) is currently on a mission to create initiatives to help improve the standards of education and healthcare, as well as help youths prepare for job opportunities in the future.
Project Yumi is a registered NGO actively operating in Australia and Papua New Guinea from what started as a donation project to establishing an NGO. It started as a group of friends who had connections to PNG either through families, relatives or who were here as residential employees gathering to discuss about the importance of what should be done to improve certain systems including education and health as volunteers.
Rather than sitting and complaining about lack of resources, the individuals got together and created the initiative to move school resources and other materials from Australia to PNG to be donated into rural communities.
I had the opportunity to meet Project Yumi’s PNG regional coordinator Jessica Bablis who has been taking care of the project here in the country during a partnership signing event and she shared some light on their initiatives as an NGO.
“In the past it was all about donations and grants that helped us to reach out to schools and aid-posts especially in rural communities, however just recently, we commenced the programme of seeking corporate sponsorships in Australia and PNG on board to support our initiatives.”
“Project Yumi’s vision is to improve the quality of education and healthcare in PNG as they are the two key areas we look at under our initiative,” Jessica said.
She said under Project Yumi there are four active initiatives that helps them pursue their goal of reaching out into the rural communities.

“So the first initiative is called the ‘project school initiative’ as we know there are schools out there in rural communities in need of supplies and materials and we need to do something about it. The project’s school initiative basically looks at education and schools in PNG, how we donate through schools is through our application process. So we have the interested schools apply through their administrations, teachers or any concerned community members through our application process.
“Depending on their number of applications coming through each province, we send containers of school materials including books, stationeries even bags and uniforms to different schools.
“We are more focused on helping schools in the rural areas, so that’s elementary, primary and even secondary schools,” she said.
“With the Project Health Initiative which was formally known as Bush Doctor is basically targeting rural aid posts so all medical equipment brought into the country through by their sponsors are sent to the rural areas. Our third initiative is called the Pass-It on project, it is basically having schools in Australia that register under Project Yumi so they choose a particular day in the school year where they leave behind something to be donated that can be bags, stationaries shoes, etc.”
“There are also awareness conducted at this schools on the status of schools in PNG especially in rural areas which helps shed some light on the situation so with this idea, it gives students living overseas the need to donate resources to schools in PNG.”
The fourth initiative is known as the Project Wok initiative which the pilot project is done late last year.
“Project wok is all about youth employment readiness, we are targeting grades 11 and 12 students, to prepare them at a very early stage by doing demo interviews and build up there interviewing skills, showing them how to write a resume so they’ll be prepared to approach employers when required for a job interview.”
“The interesting thing about Project Wok is that we get actual professionals to volunteer, so they are there actually mentoring the students to write their resume, ideally we conduct such activity in a computer labs, however where there is nothing like that we can carry out a paper based workshop as per our recent visit to 14mile.”
Generally, they have reached almost 15 provinces more than 100 schools including aid posts in the country with support from all corporate sponsors and partners.
“We have a logistic partnership with the Sir Brian Bell Foundation which helps us to move resources to school, because in PNG logistics has always been the issue and that is the financial issue for Project Yumi but we are grateful for the support. We have also had a classroom sponsorship from Credit Corporation and Remington Technology as well last year. With our new partnership with Trukai Industries Limited, we will be writing the list of schools to give to Trukai and from the list, they will select which particular schools they would like to sponsor.”
“They have made it clear that they are looking to reach out rural communities so they can look at the applications of the schools and best see which kind of school they would like to sponsor. For Trukai coming on board to pitch their support into the communities is a really good thing.”
Moving forward, Project Yumi is looking to rollout their project wok programme by expanding further into other schools and communities.
“Last year we reached out to High Schools in NCD and they’ve registered so next year with our volunteers who are professionals will be the mentors of the programme.
We will also rollout about six to ten programmes with an estimate number of participants to be around 450 students under our youth employment readiness programme. We will also be re-launching our project health initiative, formally known as the bush doctors.
“As for Project School, we are currently looking for more corporate sponsors so we will build more partnership with the rural communities especially those that have an objective to give back to the communities.
“With the Pass It On project we will continue to build our partnerships with the schools overseas, with all the information on what we do in placed online, we have established social media pages on twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram including our official website,” she added.