Women's Safety on Public Transport in Papua New Guinea

WOMEN’S SAFETY ON PUBLIC TRANSPORT IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

PHILIP F PRIESTLEY

Philip F Priestley is Assistant Foundation Manager MSB, M-Bus, Vehicle Operations Manager at Ginigoada Foundation in Port Moresby. Twitter: @Ginigoada Facebook: @GinigoadaFoundation

Papua New Guinea was once called “like every place you have never been” or “The Land of the Unexpected”. Today, this motto has changed from Unexpected to Expected when it comes to women’s lack of safety on public transport.

When women and girls have to wait at a bus stop, they are either sexually harassed by being touched or verbally abused using sexually explicit insults, or have their bags stolen. These assaults can occur on a daily basis. Working women and young schoolgirls are easy targets and at risk of being attacked.

Why does this happen? I have lived and worked in Papua New Guinea for 38 years (I am originally from England) and I have observed the way the country has changed since I came here for a twoweek holiday from Australia where I was living in 1981. PNG is blessed with abundant natural resources.

Our cities are growing because of the number of settlements created by rural and other province people moving at a rate too fast for the government to keep up with. This in turn causes overcrowding, poverty, limited work, and growing crime rates. It is impossible for the common worker to buy or own his or her own home, as housing is too expensive.

I work with a non-government organisation called The Ginigoada Foundation in Port Moresby (the capital city) with an Office in Lae (our second largest city). We train people living in villages and settlements in life skills, adult literacy, first aid, and financial literacy. We have a multi learning centre (MLC) teaching courses like computer skills, accounting, front desk and reception, hospitality and tourism.

We also run two bus services to carry women and girls only. In 2014, our then foundation manager noticed that women standing at bus stops were finding it hard to board a bus in the mornings due to young men crowding the doorway, climbing into the bus through the windows, and taking up all the seats, causing women to be left behind. Women were subject to different forms of sexual harassment, had their string bags (Bilums) cut open with razor blades or stolen either at the bus stop, or on the bus itself, and no one would attempt to stop this from happening. These assaults also occurred on the streets of all our major centres.

The foundation manager created a new bus service called the “Meri Seif Bus” (Pidgin for Women Safe Bus). The first bus was painted purple (symbolic of International Women’s Day) and only picked up women and girls. It proved to be a big success and the women seemed very grateful that this bus service created only for them was free of charge.

By 2015, and with the help of the national capital district governor who supplied more buses to The Ginigoada Foundation, we had two buses operating around various areas of the city. UN Women came on board with funding to run the buses, which was of great help. In 2017, the Australian branch of UN Women raised more funds to purchase a brand new 30-Seater Mitsubishi Rosa Bus. It was covered with signs representing the work that UN Women did in PNG, covering all aspects of women and girls’ safety on the public transport system and in public space.

Between 2017 and 2018, over 400,000 women and girls used our Meri Seif Buses, and because of this success, UN Women Australia once more raised money for the purchase of a fourth bus. These four buses helped women and girls to travel safely and without the threat of sexual harassment that they had experienced before.

Photo: ©UN Women/Mary Josephine Smare

In mid-2017, an Australian bus company, Ventura Bus Lines (Melbourne), heard about the Meri Seif Buses and donated four of its older model 74-passenger buses to The Ginigoada Foundation, with the help of Rotary International to ship them to Port Moresby at no cost to the foundation. This initiative gave us the opportunity to develop the second phase of our operation, which was to register our buses as Public Motor Vehicles (PMV) so we could charge fares. This bus line, called the M-Bus or Meri Bus, was developed so that when the current donors’ contracts for Meri Seif Buses end in 2021, we should have a fully sustainable, registered bus company operating independently.

These four additional buses came into operation in July 2018, along with two other 29-seater buses donated by a local vehicle hire company. This gave us the chance to send our buses further out of town to transport women and young girls who were experiencing similar situations of harassment.

But we didn’t stop there. When we created this bus service, it was decided to train women drivers to operate these buses and act as a way of developing a future for women to engage in work only men have done before. Benefits include self-esteem and working, as most of these women have never worked before.

IN CONCLUSION Our bus services have created a safer environment with reduced sexual harassment, incidences of bag snatching, and verbal and or sexual abuse, which women and girls were subjected to on a daily basis beforehand. This initiative has received recognition from the government, local churches, and the police.

In May 2019, we shipped two Meri Seif Buses to Lae in the hope of improving women’s safety on public transport in this area. We are hopeful that we can get more buses to expand this service to a wider area, especially in some of the rural areas, to bring village women to town markets enabling them to sell their products to sustain their families. Since writing this article, the Ginigoada Foundation has been gifted another four buses from China by our government, which were used during the recent APEC meetings held in Port Moresby in 2018.

Gola Momo (Photo supplied)

Gola Momo, 41, is one of the women bus drivers in the crowded city of Port Moresby, carrying up to 400 women and girls every Monday to Friday.

Gola’s parents could not afford to send her to school after grade 10, and although her husband encouraged her to continue schooling at an adult learning centre, finding a good job was hard.

Now, the mother of four children aged between 20 and seven-years old is a bus driver for Meri Seif. Here, Gola talks about how it has changed her life.

I think that I speak for my sisters that are engaged as female drivers. The main benefit we see is the fact that we are employed in a business that is dominated by males only and has been since PMVs (Public Motor Vehicles) first came onto the roads in PNG.

It is very hard for females to get good jobs as most lack the requirements to take on management positions in companies and government as we did not have the chance to finish our schooling. Training as a bus driver gave us the chance to break into a profession that as I mentioned was male dominated, as most of us could drive a vehicle anyway.

Now, as a female doing a ‘man’s job’, it gives us more respect and we are congratulated by the female passengers that we carry who are telling us that we are doing a great job and are thankful that we are offering them a chance to be safe when they travel as the amount of harassment they experienced before was bad.

Of course, it does not come without problems as we, the female drivers, are constantly verbally abused by the drivers and bus crews of PMVs who even throw hard objects at us and tell us we are stealing their business.

But some of the PMV crews actually respect us and have accepted us now as we have been going for nearly 18 months now and are a familiar sight on the roads. Respect and acceptance is all we want as we are doing a very important job for the safety of women and girls here in PNG.