WORLD BANK ADMITS IT GOT IT WRONG IN EAST TIMOR

BRIAN KNOWLTON – THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD – 25 april 2011

WASHINGTON: A frank evaluation by the World Bank's internal auditors of a decade's efforts to help East Timor has put much of the blame for the country's slow progress on the bank itself.

But it also illustrates the problems that arise as development agencies try to meet urgent needs while ensuring that donors' money is not misspent.

The draft report, not yet published, is a review by the Independent Evaluation Group, which reports directly to World Bank directors, covering the period from 2000 to 2010.

Among its findings are that the bank delayed the opening of four desperately needed hospitals for a year because it adhered too rigidly to its own procurement rules, even though East Timor's child mortality rate was among the highest in south-east Asia and life expectancy was barely above 56 years.

''They kept these hospitals offline for a year, though they had money in the bank to equip them,'' a World Bank official familiar with the evaluation process said.

The report also says efforts to support education were unsatisfactory. The bank did help build and repair schools. But at the request of the new government, which was trying to dismantle the Indonesian education system, it distributed teaching materials in Portuguese, which had been the main language of instruction before the Indonesian occupation, when the nation was a Portuguese colony.

The government restored Portuguese as an official language along with Tetum, an indigenous language. But Portuguese was spoken by only 5 per cent of the people, and few younger teachers could understand the materials.

It might have been more useful, the report says, to have developed texts in English or indigenous languages.

One result was that by 2009 more than 70 per cent of students tested at the end of the first grade ''could not read a single word'' of Portuguese, ''a dismal record after 10 years of efforts''.

The report asserts that at the urging of the bank, which provides loans to developing countries with the goal of fighting poverty, East Timor saved too much of its petroleum revenue rather than spent it on social projects, an approach that contributed to needlessly high levels of unemployment and poverty.

Poverty in East Timor, already twice that of Indonesia's level, ''rose significantly through most of the evaluation period and declined only after 2007, when the government, against bank advice, increased its spending using petroleum resources,'' it says.

Ferid Belhaj, the World Bank's director for East Timor, said it was against bank policy to comment on an evaluation that was not final. But he said the country had made ''tremendous progress'' in the past decade, building or rehabilitating 637 schools and helping to raise life expectancy to 61 in 2008, from 56 in 2000.

The bank's 2011 World Development Report points to the need for long-term approaches in fragile states. ''True institutional transformations require time,'' that report says. ''It typically takes 15 to 30 years for weak or illegitimate national institutions to become resilient to violence and instability.''

The New York Times