Chapter 1: A Study of Relationships Among Government and Non-Government Organizations Supporting Mother Tongue Literacy in Papua New Guinea

Fractious relationships between and among government and non-government organizations engaged in development have been well documented in the literature (see Malone, 1997). Different organizations guided by different ideologies and different visions of what the future should be like tend to target different problems and take different, sometime conflicting approaches to accomplishing their goals.

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), relationships between government agencies and NGOs and among NGOs themselves were relatively free of acrimony until the late 1980s. The PNG government placed few restrictions on NGOs—at least those whose purposes and activities were perceived as being in general agreement with successive administrations’ policies and priorities. Until the 1970s, Christian NGOs provided most of the primary education for school-aged children living in rural areas where government services were essentially unavailable (Malone, 1997). NGOs also supported mother tongue literacy programs for monolingual adults and young people without access to the formal education system. The government appreciated NGOs because of the educational quality of their programs, their willingness to serve in isolated areas and their basically non-political approach to their work.