Effect of the outcome-base education

I would like to raise some important aspects of the ‘Outcome-Base Curriculum’ or Outcome Base Education (OBE). Let me begin, by saying, large numbers of children in developing countries, including Solomon Islands receive little or no formal education. Solomon Islands is categorized as one of the developing nations in our world today. Likewise, Papua New…

Fourth Estate relations

LAST week, I spent an hour with journalism students at the University of the South Pacific during their Friday Forum session; a talanoa session during lunch-hour. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) works mainly through its programmes with 14 Pacific island countries but this was an invitation we wouldn’t have missed. We anticipated sharing our…

Gold ridge: A saviour or nighmare?

It was 6pm on a day in March 1996. And Kevin Riria Malopo, a landowner at Gold Ridge, Solomons’ only commercial gold mine outside the capital Honiara, remembers it well. He along with another landowner, Stephen Moffat, were the last hurdle in the development of Solomon Islands’ first commercial gold mine. Up to that point,…

Deep sea mining — a dangerous experiment

Deep sea mining (DSM) is the new frontier in extractive mining. For the companies involved, as well as the governments that own the mining rights, it offers substantial profits. However DSM is still experimental in nature, with potentially vast adverse environmental effects. It also makes use of new technologies that have yet to be tested.…

Whose voice are you tuning on to?

As a regular writer of this page, I too would like to acknowledge and commend our government, including the various ministries and members of the parliament who were directly involved in this festival, chairperson and members of the organizing committee, other subsidiary committees and their members, the police department and officers, the different groups of…

Visitors commend festival, SI

Self commendation is no praise, but for the Festival of Pacific Arts (FOPA) Organizing Committee to have a sense of gloom and doom and constant self-condemnation; with a sense that they have failed the Region, Solomon Islands and our people by not producing the best, may have been just becoming paranoiac on the part of…

An anti-corruption success story

Transparency Solomon Islands (TSI) in its ongoing efforts to raise people’s awareness on corruption would like to share a success story of a complaint handled by the TSI Advocacy & Legal Advice Centre (ALAC). John was very worried when his wife, Mary, was ordered to resign from her work as a shopkeeper and they were…

Discourage army presence at festival venue

Solomon Islands for the last 10 or so years had come under a lot of suspicion concerning its security as the result of the recent ethnic tension.  That was when our beloved country was shadowed and even flooded with army personnel from the region commonly known as the “Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands”, RAMSI,…