Photo: Ashlee Betteridge
The Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy has hosted 10 students from the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) at its annual summer school.
Each year, 10 of the best final year undergraduate UPNG students in public policy and economics go through a competitive process of academic assessments to be selected for the program alongside incoming Masters students.
The first ANU-UPNG Summer School was held last year as an initiative of the official partnership between the two universities.
The project is designed to build the next generation of policy leaders and scholars in PNG.
One of the summer school students, Beverly Rawia said she heard about the program through some of the ANU guest lecturers that had visited UPNG through the ANU-UPNG partnership.
“In the policy and governance course, we talk about the challenges that policy-makers face; whether the solutions they come up with are actually reasonable, and how they impact the lives of people,” Ms Rawia said.
“We learn about different ideologies and different concepts of policy and governance, but we also get practical learning skills. Our IT systems back at UPNG are quite poor and most students are almost IT illiterate. We used Wattle for the first time with the help of our lecturers.”
In addition to their classes, the students engaged in a range of extra-curricular activities, including visiting Canberra sights such as Parliament House, having dinner-time discussions with leading researchers and diplomats, and playing beach cricket on a trip to the South Coast.
