The people of Lufa in Eastern Highlands Province are set to benefit from the rehabilitation of rural airstrips in the district.
Lufa district in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea is heavily dependent on-air transport, particularly the Unavi LLG.
The people of the Unavi LLG, have no roads connecting to the other LLGs in the District and depend solely on-air transport; access to hospitals for the sick and pregnant women depend on air transport; the inhabitants also transport their bags of coffee by air and in turn they also receive much needed goods and services from the planes that fly into the rural airstrips.
But nothing much has been done in the past 30 plus years in Unavi LLG to rehabilitate the six existing rural airstrips.
A partnership with the Lufa District Development Authority (DDA) and the Rural Airstrips Agency (RAA), saw the signing of the partnership to rehabilitate the airstrips, with the deal worth over K1 million to rehabilitate six airstrips in Lufa.
The signing between Lufa DDA and the RAA extends the corporation between Lufa DDA and RAA for the next five years.
The Airstrips that will be maintained include Guasa, Herowana, Kora, Maimafu, Mengino and Ubagubi.
Lufa DDA presented its 2024 component, which is about K518, 000 (K471, 136.41 [minus tax]).
This will be matched by the RAA on a Kina-for-Kina counter agency funding arrangement and will continue until 2027.
Unavi LLG President, Peter Sarau who flew into Port Moresby for the signing said the situation continues to get worse but this development will help improve service delivery to his people.
“At the LLG we have no roads in to our area, we rely on our airstrips, some of the airstrips haven’t been maintained since 1992 and if they are in a deteriorated state it takes up to weeks without any plane landing in our LLG.
“The sick that need to be airlifted sometimes lose their lives, even pregnant women suffer when the airstrips are down, our coffee bags go off when the plane doesn’t land, but now I know we will see some improvement in our LLG,” Sarau added.
Demo Imara of the Lufa DDA said they have made the funding available to start work in this very important endeavor.
“The district has three LLGs and most of them are accessible by road and through rural airstrips the District Development Authority have allocated funding to improve rural airstrips, and we identified the RRA as one of our core partners, the DDA has allocated K518, 000 to start work as our funding component,” Imara said.
Chief Executive officer of the Rural Airstrips Authority Kim Opiti said they look forward to working on rehabilitating the six rural airstrips in the district.
“Rural airstrips were given back to the Provincial Governments but there was no rehabilitation of rural airstrips.
“We look forward to this partnership with the Provincial Governments to help the rural communities, we will work with the people of Lufa and rehabilitate these airstrips and bring back much needed air services to the rural communities,” Opiti said.
Member for Lufa, Simon Kilefa said it was his DDAs utmost priority to ensure the rehabilitation of the rural airstrips to improve the flow of goods and services.
“Since 1975 the Lufa District LLG, Unavi LLG hasn’t been connected by road to the other areas in Lufa, that part of the district has always relied on air transport for goods and services and for transporting their cash crops which include Coffee bags to Goroka town.
“The upgrade of the six airstrips in Unavi LLG is one of our priorities right now, to ease the access of services and transport of cash crops out of the LLG,” Kilefa said.