Twenty shipping containers holding 539,000 primary school textbooks have arrived in Papua New Guinea.
The textbooks, funded by the Australian Government, were selected by PNG Department of Education primary curriculum officers and are destined for PNG's more-than 3,400 primary schools and eight teacher colleges.
The containers arrived on two ships, one unloading its precious cargo in Lae and the other in Port Moresby.
From here the books will be sorted, with each primary and community school in the country receiving a set of 159 books.
'This is a massive logistical operation,' said Acting head of AusAID in PNG, Robin Scott-Charlton.
'Getting the books to PNG is the easy part. From Lae and Port Moresby the books will be broken into smaller amounts and sent to every provincial capital from where they will be distributed to all primary and community schools in each province.'
Ms Scott-Charlton said the textbook program was a good example of the partnership between Australia and PNG working towards better development outcomes in PNG.
'These textbooks are a part of the joint commitment between our two countries to increase PNG's net primary enrolment rate to seventy per cent by 2015, a figure that will see an extra 300,000 children in school.'
The acting Secretary for PNG's Department of Education, Luke Taita, said that getting more children into school was not just a matter of increasing student numbers.
'This has to be supported by a range of other activities such as ensuring the availability of appropriate teaching resources,' said the Acting Secretary.
'These books will have a significant impact, focusing on the core subjects of maths, science and language. This will be particularly important in many of the smaller and more isolated schools where teaching resources are often scarce.'
The delivery of books to schools is likely to be completed by the middle of the year.
The packs contain maths, science and language texts for grades 6, 7 and 8.
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Papua New Guinea
Improving education in developing countries