Sustaining their retirement pay

The Milne Bay Provincial Administration aims to use SME entrepreneurial training to create an exit pathway for retiring public servants.

Provincial commerce advisor Didimas Epo said many public servants retire without proper knowledge of sustaining their retirement pay.

Therefore, he said the provincial administration, through its commerce division, wanted to create a pathway for its retiring public servants.

“From experience, we found out that a lot of public servants leave without being given a proper pathway and at the end, they find out that they lost all their money because of bad or poor investments,” he said

Epo and nine other public servants from different economic sectors of the provincial and district administration were in Port Moresby from 4th to 15 of September for the Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) Training of Trainers workshop. The event was hosted by the Small and Medium Enterprise Corporation in partnership with International Labour Organisation.

Epo said the reason why they had representatives from different economic sectors was because they wanted a collaborative approach throughout the provincial administration to roll out SME in the districts and LLGs.

He said the ‘exit pathway’ will be trialed with the education sector before being replicated throughout the other sectors.

“With the education sector, it is kind of an exit pathway for teachers when they leave so we get someone trained and when teachers are preparing to leave, the SIYB trainer can step in and give them knowledge on how to start up a small business using their retirement pay.”

Author: 
Freddy Mou