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BBC MUNDO RADIO
AFRANK evaluation by the World Bank's internal auditors of a decade of efforts to help Timor Leste underscores the challenges facing international organisations attempting to assist struggling nations.
The draft report, which has yet to be released publicly, assigns much of the fault for slow progress in Timor Leste, which only emerged in 1999 after a quarter-century struggle for independence from Indonesia, to the bank itself. But it also illustrates the dilemmas that arise as development agencies try to meet urgent needs while ensuring that donor money is not misspent.
The report by the Independent Evaluation Group, which reports directly to World Bank directors, covers the period from 2000 to 2010.
It says the World Bank delayed the opening of four desperately needed hospitals for a year because it adhered too rigidly to its own procurement rules. This was in a country where the child mortality rate was among the highest in Southeast Asia, life expectancy was barely over 55 and there had been "a total breakdown of the healthcare system".
Efforts to support education were unsatisfactory. On the positive side, the bank helped 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.
This had been the main language of instruction before the Indonesian occupation, when Timor Leste was a Portuguese colony, and the new government restored it as an official language along with Tetum, an indigenous language. But Portuguese was spoken by only five per cent of the population, and few younger teachers could understand the materials.
It might have been more useful, the report says, to have developed indigenous or English-language texts, because English is a far more widely spoken language than Portuguese and the language of nearby Australia, as well as the language of the United Nations Transitional Administration in Timor Leste.
One result: by 2009, more than 70 per cent of students tested at the end of the first grade "could not read a single word" of a simple text in Portuguese. "This is a dismal record after 10 years of efforts," the report says. "A full cohort of the population may be functionally illiterate."
The report asserts that, at the urging of the bank -- which provides loans to developing countries with an explicit goal of fighting poverty -- Timor Leste saved too much of its precious petroleum revenues rather than spend them on social projects, an approach that contributed to needlessly high levels of poverty and unemployment.
Poverty, already at twice the rate of Indonesia, "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," the report states.
Ferid Belhaj, World Bank country director for Timor Leste, says the country has made "tremendous progress" in the past decade, building or rehabilitating 637 schools, and helping increase life expectancy from 56 in 2000 to 61 in 2008.
"The World Bank has been supporting their efforts to overcome the huge development challenges which are faced by all post-conflict countries where political and social institutions are fragile, and things can go wrong," he says. "In Timor Leste, we have had to adjust over the years to fast changing and unpredictable situations."
The bank's new World Development Report 2011 points to the need for long time horizons in fragile states. "True institutional transformations require time," it says. "It typically takes 15 to 30 years for weak or illegitimate national institutions to become resilient to violence and instability."
At independence, Timor Leste was devastated. An estimated 70 per cent of its economic infrastructure had been destroyed in years of fighting that had killed thousands and displaced much of the population.
The World Bank is supposed to work through local governments, but Timor Leste barely had one then. Ministry offices were sometimes staffed by former rebels fresh from the hills.
It is a classic tension, development specialists say. Recipient countries want assistance quickly. Donors want assurances their money will be well spent. The World Development Report emphasises the need to help fragile countries quickly but responsibly.
"International agencies and partners from other countries must adapt to procedures so they can respond with agility and speed," it states. "We need to accept a higher level of risk: if legislatures and inspectors expect only the upside, and just pillory the failures, institutions will steer away from the most difficult problems and strangle themselves with procedures and committees."
The question raised by critics, and at least indirectly by the new evaluation, is whether the World Bank has fully internalised those lessons about flexibility and less risk-aversion.
"We err on the side of caution," says Lant Pritchett, a former World Bank adviser who is now a professor of economic development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Difficult compromises are often necessary, specialists say.
"If you're in a post-conflict situation and you think people's lives are at stake, you are going to want to try to move as quickly as possible, even though you recognise that maybe some things are going to be used less efficiently," says Michael Morfit, a professor of international development at Georgetown University who worked in Indonesia for the United States Agency for International Development. "You just accept that as the trade-off."
The case of the Portuguese-language school texts in Timor Leste poses a somewhat different but still challenging question: when to resist a government's policies if these seem ill-advised.
"In 1999, the education system had collapsed and enrolment was close to zero," the evaluation report states. But it adds that there appears to be no serious discussion within the World Bank as to "whether it made sense for the bank to finance the distribution of textbooks in Portuguese to teachers and children who didn't understand the language".
But present and former officials say the bank had little choice but to accept a government's preferences when it comes to such matters as an official language.
"They're not ill-meaning," Pritchett says of bank officials. "They're just trying to follow the rules of the organisation." -- IHT
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