London donor conference concludes

Donor country representatives, along with international organisations and the United Nations, have concluded a two-day meeting in London on how best to address Tajikistan's assistance needs. "This was a working meeting. It was not a large pledging conference," Bill Paton, UN Resident Coordinator for Tajikistan told IRIN from London on Tuesday as the meeting concluded. Describing it as a "roll up your shirt sleeves, frank and practical discussion", the UN official, who led a five-member delegation from the UN, saw the UK-hosted conference as a way of determining the intentions of the government, donors and international organisations on the issue of development in the Central Asia state. While Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, has moved away from being a humanitarian emergency over recent years, with most humanitarian actors seeing a need for a greater emphasis on development in the near future, the challenges ahead remain immense. Over 83 percent of the country's 6.5 million inhabitants live below the national poverty line, according to the World Bank, while a full 17 percent are considered destitute. Organised with assistance from the World Bank, along with the United Nations, the conference endeavoured to address precisely that - and how to do it better. Among the participants was the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Asia Development Bank (ADB), the IMF, as well as donor representatives from the US, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada and others. "The main outcome was that there was really a strong overall agreement that the strategy in Tajikistan should emphasise pro-poor growth, including a focus on development," Paton maintained. During the course of the conference, attended by some 45 participants, a number of practical issues were identified for more extensive collaboration over the next six months, including community level governance, devolving decision to the community level, the issue of land reform, small and medium sized enterprises and private sector development, as well as skills transfer. "I think that sometimes the government felt that there is so much money spent on international technical assistance, we should really make more of an effort, and I think we have all agreed to make more of an effort, to see that there is actually a skills transfer instead," he explained. The government on the other hand is to look at salary issues and whether or not they can do more to retain qualified Tajiks. While lastly, a number of detailed issues in making implementation more effective were discussed. "Overall I'm impressed," Paton said. "I have been to a lot of donor meetings and this was a relatively good one because it was very much a practical meeting," coming up with a number of action items for the donor community to work more closely together on over the next year, he explained. As for specific concerns raised during the meeting by both the donors and government, both sides would like to see the rate of disbursements of international assistance to continue to accelerate. "It's not doing too badly, but we would like to see it continue to accelerate," Paton said, noting that the UN made a pledge to assist the government, with the tracking of aid disbursements. "This was a meeting on how we are going to do that better," he added. On their side, the government felt they were doing all they could, that they had set up all the different mechanisms that they had been asked to set up, and were really asking the donor community what more they could do, while the donor community on their part, raised issues like privatisation, the speed and quality of the land reform process, the issue of giving the government more power on the community level, etc. "I thought it was a rather frank discussion," he said, adding education reform was another issue agreed to be receiving special attention this year. The conference came two months after the local launch of the Consolidated Inter-Agency Appeals Process (CAP) for Tajikistan for 2004 amid gradual signs of improvement in the impoverished mountainous state. The CAP seeks US $53.7 million to address acute humanitarian needs in the country, while building national capacities and fostering economic recovery at central and regional levels. "This was a transition CAP, meaning we acknowledge that the situation has moved beyond the humanitarian emergency and we are now in a development phase, and need to focus on development assistance," Johannes Chudoba, special assistant to Paton told IRIN from London. "And this meeting was part of that development side of it."