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Photo: ©UN Women/Mary Josephine Smare
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. 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.
