Friday, September 15, 2006

by Gilbert Le Gras

SINGAPORE, (Reuters): Haiti would benefit from faster implementation of its aid programmes if it were assigned a larger UN peacekeeping force to ensure the safety of development workers, a top World Bank official said on Thursday.

In August the United Nations renewed the mandate of its peacekeeping force for six months at its current size of about 9,000 soldiers and police despite UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's call for a 12-month extension.

"That is very much on the low side for UN peacekeeping forces when you look across the spectrum of the world and I think donors have recognised that, without that security-development nexus, you're not going to get progress," said the World Bank's Latin America and Caribbean director, Caroline Anstey.

Troop and police contributions are typically determined by donor countries' foreign and defence ministries while aid funding is approved by finance and development officials, and coordination is sometimes lacking, she said.

"We need to bring those together so security and development can go hand in hand so, for example, we can go into Cite Soleil and do development projects," Anstey said in reference to the most dangerous shanty town in the Caribbean country of 8.6 million people.

"It's very hard for development institutions and NGOs to deliver cleaner water, clean streets, sanitation in areas that are insecure," she added.

On Monday UN troops took over several slums in Port-au-Prince that had been held by armed gangs believed to be loyal to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was forced from power in February 2004.

A meeting of 26 donor countries and agencies in July topped up and extended the two-year-old International Cooperation Framework (ICF) with $750 million for 13 more months after the original $1.1-billion ICF expired, well beyond Haitian President Rene Preval's request for $500 million.

"If you look back five years, 10 years, 15 years, there was a tendency for donors to come in with competing programmes draped in national flags, a lot of overlap, a lot of lack of coordination," Anstey said.

"Three years ago Haiti barely had a budget. Now it has a budget, it's on time, it's transparent. We, the World Bank, helped set up a civil society monitoring mechanism to make sure that transparency exists and I think the government has done a lot to put together an economic governance reform agenda," she added.

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