By Meriba Tulo – EMTV News, Port Moresby
With efforts to connect more coffee farmers to markets, a contract was recently awarded for the rehabilitation of a section of road in the Eastern Highlands.
Kassampy Construction, a local civil engineering company will work on a 12 kilometer stretch of road over the next six months, to connect more than two hundred coffee farmers, to markets.
This road rehabilitation is being facilitated through the World Bank’s PPAP program.
For Eastern Highlands Province, coffee remains one crop that provides income for a sizeable population.
A good number of organic coffee comes from this province, with production quantity, and quality improving each year.
The Papua New Guinea Coffee Industry Corporation has received support from the World Bank to assist in rehabilitating infrastructure to enable coffee from growers to reach markets.
Among them, selected roads in key areas.
Recently a contract was awarded to local company Kassampy Construction Limited for the rehabilitation of 12.8 kilometers of the road in the Eastern Highlands.
“This is a 12.8km feeder road from Yasubi to Purosa. It’s a road that has deteriorated over time,” Kassampy Construction Ltd Managing Director, Pius Pekofira said,” a lot of organic coffee comes from this area’.
This is not the first time for this company to be awarded a road work contract – they also successfully delivered a similar project in 2017 through the World Bank’s PPAP Program.
“I can say that the work speaks for itself. They saw that our work allowed bigger vehicles to transport coffee.”
For this company, a commitment to quality is one that they will stick to, so that coffee farmers in the rural Eastern Highlands can have easy access to markets in the province, and beyond.
“CIC saw the need for the transportation of this coffee. So through the World Bank and PPAP, we were awarded this contract to fix this road,” Pekofira said, “they need the road to transport the coffee to markets.”
