Papua New Guinea
An island of great history
Spotlight: Papua New Guinea
Why Papua New Guinea?
There’s more to PNG than we know. Most people when they think about Papua New Guinea believe it’s just remote tribes and coconut trees for days. However, there’s more to PNG than these beautiful and natural blessings. PNG is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third-largest island country with an area of 462,840 km2 (178,700 sq mi).
Having said that, there’s a lot of poverty that is happening in the country as well. Papua New Guinea's hospitals are on the brink of collapse, with no money, limited supplies, and patients in dire need of basic healthcare. Like a lot of rural PNG, many hospitals are cut off from the majority of the country. To get to the nearest major center you must go by boat, on a trip that takes at least a day. According to the multi-dimensional poverty measure, 85.7 percent of the population is living in poverty. This is due to the high rate of monetary poverty, low educational achievement, and most of the population (82.1 percent) having no access to electricity.
Diversity Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is the world’s most linguistically diverse nation, where ∼9 million people speak ∼840 languages. PNG’s languages are highly diverse, classified into at least 33 families. Until recently, these languages enjoyed widespread vitality due to the absence of a dominant language in the region, stable small-scale multilingualism, and a focus on language as a marker of group identity. New Guinea is also the world’s most floristically diverse island, comprising ∼5% of the world’s biodiversity. Throughout PNG, numerous indigenous communities have explored, systematized, used, and managed the extraordinary biodiversity in their natural environment, thus generating extensive biocultural knowledge of local ecosystems.
