Noah Kool

Noah Kool Yalba (born 10 October 1962) is a Papua New Guinean politician. He has been the Governor of Chimbu Province from 2012 to 2017, as a member of the governing People's National Congress.^[2][3]

Kool was a school teacher and member of the Papua New Guinea rugby league team prior to entering politics.^[4][5] He played in one match for Papua New Guinea, playing against the Great Britain Lions during their 1990 tour.

He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Chimbu governorship at a March 2004 by-election (for the People's Labour Party) and the 2007 election (for the United Party).^[6][7] He won the seat on his third attempt as an independent at the 2012 election, and joined the governing People's National Congress after the election.^[8][9]

In October 2012, he set up a permanent office for the province in Port Moresby to minimise the expense of trips to the capital by provincial public servants.^[10] In February 2013, he was credited with the opening of the Chimbu Teachers College, the first tertiary institution in the province, as a means of developing human resources to support economic growth in what Kool described as a province "geographically rugged and unsuitable for any major economic development.^[11] In May 2015, he called for tougher cannabis trafficking laws.^[12] In late 2015, he repeatedly called for greater aid for the province in response to a devastating drought which had dried up water supplies and destroyed crops, declaring that it had become an "emergency situation".^[13][14] In May 2016, Kool announced that he had secured funding for the Simbu Unitech Satellite Campus, a Kundiawa campus of the Lae-based Papua New Guinea University of Technology.^[15]