Senior Deputy Executive Director, World Food Programme

ECOSOC 2004 High-Level Segment Preparatory Roundtable

Enabling Environment and Resources Mobilization for the Least Developed Countries Emerging from Conflict

18 March 2003

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this distinguished forum, on behalf of the World Food Programme.

I am pleased that we have the opportunity to benefit from the reflections of the ECOSOC Ad-hoc working Groups on Guinea Bissau and Burundi. The Ad-hoc working groups have helped draw attention to the opportunities and challenges that are present in these two countries. Their reflections help ensure that our discussions today are rooted in the realities of two countries that are currently struggling to move from conflict to peace, from crisis to recovery.

The World Food Programme is no stranger to these realities. Over 40% of the countries where we work are either engaged in protracted crises or struggling to emerge from them. We can make an important contribution to the recovery process by continuing to meet urgent needs while critical social services are re-established, by helping people preserve their assets rather than selling or depleting them to procure food, by rehabilitating damaged infrastructure through food for work, by helping children to return to school and by meeting the needs of returning refugees, internally displaced and even demobilized soldiers while they restore productivity or learn new skills,

Our experience has also shown that poverty, and the struggle for greater control over resources, often lies at the core of conflicts. In fact, most internal, civil conflicts in recent years have taken place in LDCs. In addition, LDCs, which already lack resources and are least able to cope, are not only themselves prone to crises but are also often forced to play host to large refugee influxes. These influxes place an enormous strain on social services and can result in tensions with local communities.

Thus it is certainly appropriate that we focus today on the particular challenges that LDCs face when struggling to emerge from conflict. There are many but I will focus on three that most directly address the issues in the background paper.

Addressing challenges to creating an enabling environment

1. Governments in countries emerging from conflict are central to the transition planning, implementation and coordination processes, but have limited capacity to lead or engage actively in these processes. They may be nascent or transitional structures, they may have limited legitimacy with some aspects of the population or their capacity may simply be weak. Over-reliance on the government in these situations would result in little or no social services for the population at a critical time when needs are great and commitment to the peace process is essential. Last year in Guinea Bissau, for example, education in the country was completely paralyzed when teachers stopped work after 13 months without salaries. Communities took over running some former public schools, but did so without following the national curriculum or standards, with inadequately trained teachers, etc.

The UN often finds itself in a position where it needs to continue to provide overall leadership in planning and implementation, until such time as the government can fulfil its responsibilities. But we must not let this be an excuse to avoid the more difficult task of building national capacity and transitioning management of the overall effort to national structures. The two tasks must proceed simultaneously. One technique that has proven helpful for WFP has been to place staff and systems within government institutions for an interim period. For example, in Afghanistan, we assisted the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development to strengthen its technical capacity in vulnerability and food security assessment by seconding five national and international staff to the Ministry and providing basic office equipment. Right now, we are working with FAO to provide an expert to the government of Sierra Leone to help them establish a food security policy. We have also helped governments in Rwanda and Burundi establish national disaster management, prevention and response capacities. These types of efforts transfer knowledge and build capacity through on-the-job staff training.

One additional thing to keep in mind is the importance of considering the needs of a country within the broader regional context. This is critical given such issues as population movements, cross-border trade, common reliance on natural resources, etc. At WFP, we have improved our ability to do this by decentralizing the management of our operations to the regional level and by putting in place regional programmes in some areas, such as West Africa, the Great Lakes and Southern Africa. This has helped us to think regionally as well as nationally, follow people as they move and shift funds among countries as needed. We have also been forging relationships with regional bodies, such as SADC and ECOWAS, which can play an important role in supporting post-conflict transitions.

2. Meeting the needs of those most vulnerable is not always sufficiently prioritized in post-conflict planning processes. In the aftermath of a peace agreement, or other signs that peace is on the horizon, there is often a climate of optimism about the future and a desire to put in place programmes that demonstrate this optimism in a tangible way. This translates into a collective move to develop new projects that focus on consolidating the peace, such as demobilization and integration programmes, public works and civil servant payments.

However, not only do the needs of the most vulnerable tend to persist for some time even following a viable peace process, often they increase as access is attained to new areas and agencies are able to assist people previously out of reach. Following the peace agreement in Angola, we gained access to new areas where hundreds of thousands of people were in desperate condition. We had to move quickly to provide food and other assistance to meet their most basic needs. Right now in Burundi, humanitarian needs are vast and will continue to be there for a number of years, even if comprehensive peace is reached and maintained. In LDCs, this tends to hold true not just for those who were directly impacted by the conflict but also the millions of rural and urban poor who were not able to benefit from development opportunities throughout the conflict.

Restarting the formal economy is also an important priority. Clearly, sufficient security for investors is a major component of this. But agencies like WFP can make an important contribution. Two-thirds of the food WFP purchases is procured in developing countries, amounting to several hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Right now, for example, we are procuring significant quantities of cereals in Burkina Faso for our humanitarian operations in Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia. We also contract with local trucking companies to move food, which can represent a huge injection of cash into local economies. For example, last year we channelled $27 million into the local trucking sector in Angola.

3. Quick projects that show results at the community level can play an important role in bolstering peace processes, but few governments or agencies are able to put such plans into action in the time required. Launching viable, quick impact projects requires direct communication with civil society, particularly women, and quick disbursing mechanisms to support community-level activities. Areas where large numbers of displaced people and returnees are returning to should be first on the list for quick projects. But it is important to develop projects that address needs prioritized by the community and that benefit the entire community and not just the returning populations to avoid exacerbating tensions among the groups. Where activities increase the visibility of the government – such as using government agents as food distributors or supporting nutrition programmes through the public health system – we can help the government demonstrate to the local population that it, and not just the international community, is doing something to address their needs.

Governments, and particular LDCs, have difficulty moving sufficiently quickly to launch these types of projects, but agencies like WFP can play an important, supportive role. We have experience working directly with groups of women and men to plan and implement assistance programmes, such as in Sierra Leone and Angola. Moreover, we have a programming mechanism for Protracted Relief and Recovery operations that is multi-year and permits us to mobilize and deploy resources to support both relief and recovery activities. This helps us to quickly shift our food assistance programmes from relief to recovery and back and move into new areas as the situation on the ground changes. However, we know that food is most effective in supporting transitions when linked with important non-food goods and services. In addition, it is also important that alongside the crucial and needed national planning process, quick-action projects be supported and implemented to help revive economic and social activities for the population at large.

Tackling resource mobilization challenges

This leads us to the question of funding, and the two resource mobilization issues that were raised in the background paper. WFP has had considerable success using our protracted relief and recovery programme category to mobilize resources. Some of our partners within and outside the UN have been more constrained by their programming mechanisms and are looking at ways to enhance them.

But while agencies can and should support activities that help LDCs and other countries transition from conflict to peace, it is essential to also have mechanisms to channel funds to governments to build or support their capacity to provide social services or even to meet budgetary support needs, such as in Guinea Bissau. In time of transition, donors are sometimes reluctant to provide funding directly to governments and seek other more accountable mechanisms. Trust funds, such as those established in East Timor, DRC and the Great Lakes, were eventually helpful, but cumbersome procedures and slow disbursement of funds hindered quick and timely response. In East Timor, for example, we had to use food aid to pay civil servants until the trust fund could allocate cash. More recent trust funds in Afghanistan, Iraq and Liberia have sought to redress the constraints.

Coordination, the last issue that was flagged in the background paper, is important. It is an issue that has occupied ECOSOC on many occasions and indeed there is still much scope for improvement. We have found that while the “spirit” of coordination can be promoted and encouraged from outside, actual coordination is most viable at the country level. This requires credible, field-based coordination mechanisms that bring relevant actors from national and donor governments, the UN and the international financial institutions together to develop strategies, plan assistance activities, monitor progress and make adjustments as needed. It requires nations to translate the concept of national ownership into concrete steps that they can take to demonstrate leadership and provide support as their nations strive to make the difficult transition from conflict to peace. In this regard, ECOSOC’s continued attention and dialogue on ways to address the obstacles that prevent LDCs from successfully emerging from conflict is most welcome.

Thank you.