Separation from the UK political discourse

(Unrelated to Timor, but something I’ve been thinking about this week. My main points are that (i) I can personally see why the left is arguing against the cuts and agree, but (ii) I think they are failing to successfully communicate their reasoning beyond the headline of "cuts are bad"; people get this, but aren't aware what the alternatives are. )

Being on the other side of the world and largely deprived of UK media and political conversations with friends over the last 2 months has been a real eye-opener. It made me realise what a muffled message most people in the UK are likely to get on politics, and how important it is to get the message clear and reasoned. Here on the other side of the world, I’m hearing the basic message, but not the reasoning.

At home, I read the Guardian and BBC, topped up with Liberal Conspiracy, Left Foot Forward and Guido, then discuss issues in the pub with friends regularly. Here, I’m reading far more on East Timor and international affairs. Consequently, I’m only receiving about 10% of the UK-oriented information that I usually get.

For example, I could tell you that in recent weeks students have been demonstrating against increases in top-up fees and Labour are organising against most cuts in general. But I couldn’t tell you the nuanced arguments behind why Labour are arguing against most of the cuts, beyond “they’ll hit the poor hardest” which is obvious.

I am instinctively drawn to anti-cuts positions, being an independent man of the left. (I have variously voted Lib Dem and Green but not yet Labour – I was sixteen on 9/11, after which they became authoritarian and war-mongering – that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t vote Labour if Ed Miliband cleans things up). However, without the detail, the likely right-wing counter-argument is harder to refute. For example, Labour’s election campaign also acknowledged the need for cuts, just slower ones on a slightly different ratio. Is it not hypocritical of them to wail at every lost public sector job?

I know that most of Labour’s positions are defensible. I would and could happily defend them myself. My point is that with my media intake being 10% of what it usually is, I couldn’t immediately tell you how they are defending it currently. This is important, because even out here I’m probably still reading 10x more news than the majority of the British public.

It really brings it home how important the headlines are, and how you need to make the message simple yet reasoned. Anyone arguing against cuts needs to be upfront about either (i) what they would cut instead, (ii) which taxes they would raise instead, or (iii) why cuts aren’t needed at all. I want to hear this every time an anti-cuts statement is made.

Whilst it’s fair to say that the Tories are being overly ideological in some respects and going further than is needed, that is a side-issue – everyone campaigned on the fact that some cuts are needed. The default right-wing response is “all these cuts are Gordon Brown’s fault, and you’d be cutting this yourself if you’d won the election”. To the right sort of person, that line of argument becomes more persuasive when Labour aren’t clearly justifying their positions.

Personally I buy the narrative that (i) the financial crisis was mainly due to contagion from the USA, (ii) graphs don’t lie – Britain’s debt wasn’t at historically high levels in 2008, and (iii) Gordon did the right thing in bailing out the banks. But I’m not hearing a more nuanced message from the left than simply “fight the cuts”. Maybe Labour people think if they complain loudly enough about the cuts for the next 5 years, people will blame the whole lot on the Coalition and vote Labour again. I honestly don’t think this will be enough.

Timor celebrates World Toilet Day

A few weeks back it was World Toilet Day (Loron Mundial Sintina). Incidentally, I started work at WaterAid on that day back in 2007, so it also marked 3 years service for me. As you can imagine, WaterAid Timor Leste was pretty busy on the day. Most of the team were in Liquiça district to support a village to declare itself Open Defecation Free (ODF), which is a key element of the CLTS approach I mentioned in this post.

An ODF declaration is an important milestone in a village’s commitment to sanitation. It is a clear public statement, complete with signboard, that “practising open defecation” (apologies for jargon, it basically means crapping in the woods) is no longer acceptable and everyone is now using a toilet, however basic. The problem, of course, is how to get people to progress from the most basic toilet to something more durable. For more info on the event, I suggest you read this article on the WaterAid Australia website by my colleague Jose Seixas.

So, most of the team were down in Liquiça, but Jose, Tofik and myself were in Dili attending the National Toilet Awards. This excellent event was organised by the Ministry of Infrastructure and BESIK (the AusAid-funded programme supporting the water supply and sanitation directorate of the Ministry). They had  mustered NGOs and private sector organisations involved in sanitation marketing from across the whole of Timor. The Vice Minister of Health was in attendance to inspect the various designs, giving some political weight to the proceedings.

Most people had the basic moulded cement pans, though prices ranged from $3-5 due to different business models and material availability. There were also some other innovative designs on show. WaterAid had supported Januario (mentioned in this post) to attend, and he brought along a few examples of a simple latrine made from a PVC pipe, and ended up winning a prize for it, which was great. The picture above shows him with part of his display. PVC is currently quite expensive here as it's imported, but prices for many materials are coming down at the moment.

These awards are great for generating interest around sanitation marketing, rewarding those entrepreneurs with good ideas, encouraging them to stick with the business and innovate more. Hopefully it will become an annual fixture. A video was made, and if it becomes available online, I’ll link to it.

I was particularly taken by the exposition of the soap-making activities supported by the Japanese NGO AFMET, who work out in Lospalos. They are helping communities produce high-quality soap made mostly from local materials like coconut oil. Their soap is also available in shops in Dili, so I’ve been using it myself. Hygiene promotion is the most cost-effective health intervention available, but hand-washing only forms a proper disease transmission barrier when soap is used. I think AFMET’s scheme is great and I’m going to try and do a full blogpost on it another time – you can read about it on the second page of this PDF.

Happy belated World Toilet Day!

The problem and politics of language

East Timor has many languages, both local and externally imposed. As described in my history post, East Timor was colonised by the Portuguese about 500 years ago. Consequently the “official” language (meaning the language of law and educated people) was Portuguese. The Indonesian invasion changed everything – the speaking of Bahasa Indonesia was enforced in schools and official business. Consequently, most people now speak it.

In practice however, the Timorese have always spoken their own languages amongst themselves the whole time, and the lingua franca is arguably Tetun rather than Bahasa. Tetun is essentially a creole of various local languages with many words borrowed from Portuguese. Everyone in Dili speaks Tetun, but the further away you go, the more local languages become the mother tongue. There are in fact more than 30 languages in the various districts (see map above). Less educated people will only be able to speak their local language, and will not even understand much Tetun.

All this makes things extremely complicated, not to mention political. After independence from Indonesia, Portuguese was chosen as the official language, a controversial decision for many. After all, what’s the point in choosing a language which only educated people over 50 can speak? One might note that the political elite at the time was composed of these people. Many exiled independence leaders spent the 80s and 90s overseas in Portugal or Mozambique.

Even the most optimistic lusophile would admit that less than 5% of the population speak Portuguese. To be fair however, what was the alternative? Bahasa is widely spoken, but to choose it would have been politically unpalatable. Some people say “why not English?” but even fewer people speak English than Portuguese.

Why not Tetun, then? Put simply, it does not have enough words. Written Tetun (which has no agreed form, by the way) borrows huge numbers of words from either Portuguese or Bahasa. It would be impossible to draft complicated laws in Tetun. It is also not used anywhere else in the world, so would not be great for business, whereas Portuguese is at least spoken in a large number of countries, including emerging global power Brazil.

So in the end, they chose Portuguese, for better or for worse. This is already bringing serious complications – MPs are legally obliged to speak Portuguese in parliament but most cannot. I personally haven’t heard a single Timorese speaking it. In theory, Portuguese has been the language used in schools since independence, but in practice very few teachers can speak it well. So, lots of kids are learning in bad Portuguese. Their parents can’t speak it, so kids can’t get help with their homework. As the children who started school since 1999 get older, it will become even more complicated. University-level books are mostly in Bahasa, and all the lecturers are used to teaching in Bahasa. The list of problems goes on. It’s an educational nightmare, and it will take a long time to sort it out.

(I’m extremely glad that I did a beginners course in Tetun at the Dili Institute of Technology, which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone coming here, by the way. Tetun is a really interesting language and, thankfully, it’s incredibly simple. I’ll do it proper justice in a full post sometime soon.)

ahi maté (electricity dead)

As mentioned in my previous post, ahi maté is a great excuse to stop work and chat. You might care to complain about the government, the dodgy generators they’ve bought, or anything else that’s bothering you. The acronym of the current coalition government is AMP (Aliança com Maioria Parlamentar), but some wags claim that it really stands for Ahi Maté Permanenté.

This is a little unfair, as most parts of Dili only get ahi mate a couple of hours a day, which by developing country standards is pretty good. There is even a schedule, not that they seem to keep to it. In fact, we’re pretty lucky in Dili. In the foho (lit. hills, but shorthand for poor rural areas) you’d be lucky to get a grid connection at all. Even in other towns there’s usually only power for a few hours in the evening.

Most of East Timor’s electricity comes from huge oil-powered generators. Recently, these seem to have been breaking down more often. It’s also rumoured that there’s more ahi maté towards the end of the year because at that time the money for fuel is running out. The government is investing big-time in old Chinese heavy oil generators, but this is being criticised in some quarters as short-sighted. One of the country’s leading NGOs, La’o Hamutuk, writes persuasively on this issue, see here.

We have a generator in the WaterAid office, which means that it doesn’t all grind to a halt for us. However, the house I’m staying in is not so blessed, so I’m drafting this post by candlelight. It’s actually quite good to live without power for a while. It reminds you that this is the daily reality for the 1.4 billion people who don’t have access to electricity, and indeed for most people here in East Timor. If you’re interested in rural energy, I thoroughly recommend the work Practical Action are doing around the world, see here.

Udan boot (big rain)

(update: Ed from PDT has posted a good blog here which also touches on this. As the drainage issue is topical, I'll give it a proper treatment in a longer blog post in the future)

Udan boot (lit. big rain) and ahi maté (lit. electricity dead) are two of the best conversation starters here in East Timor. Both are excuses to stop work and chat. They’re also great excuses for a blog post, so here are a few thoughts on the former.

If udan boot happens, the done thing is to stand in your doorway, marvel at the great sheets of rain coming down, and laugh at the foolish people still attempting to get around. With udan boot it’s also obligatory for any boys under the age of 18 to take their shirts off and run around throwing water at each other. I’ll join in one of these days...

Often, the udan is boot enough that the streets flood pretty quickly. The above photo shows my street under water earlier today, and that’s nothing. You can bet that the people in the poorer and lower-lying parts of town are getting their houses flooded with all the crap from the street and drainage channels. That often includes raw sewage, just in case you were wondering.

There is a system of drainage channels in Dili compared to cities. It's not great, but better than what I've seen in other developing countries. Nevertheless, they often fail to handle udan boot properly and arguably need upgrading, which the government looks set to do. However, one might question whether investing millions in drainage for the capital city is pro-poor. After all, poverty in Dili is relatively low compared to rural areas, and a comparably high proportion of people in Dili have access to water and sanitation. Scarce budgets should potentially therefore be allocated to parts of the country where they are most needed.

On the other hand, the capital city is the economic centre. If things slow down or grind to a halt whenever it rains hard (which let’s face it is pretty often), GDP will take a hit and this will affect the whole country negatively. There are also clearly negative effects on people's health (mostly likely the poorest) in Dili from the regular floods - I wouldn't be surprised if a few people had died from water-borne diseases. Furthermore, stories of the city flooded with raw sewage will put tourists off, meaning their vital foreign currency will go elsewhere. Personally I’ll reserve judgement until I fully understand the pros and cons from talking to more people about it.

The frequency of udan boot has been increasing this week, leading me to believe that the monsoon could finally be starting. December is usually the wettest month, with the monsoon gearing up a bit earlier. However, this year things have been very strange, arguably due to the la niña effect. Uncharacteristically, there has been sporadic rain throughout the dry season, which means that the hillsides are still green – normally they would be red and dry by now. We have still enjoyed (suffered?) dry season temperatures however, which means 30-32C every day…

Making toilets desirable but also affordable for the poor

There is consensus in the sanitation sector that in countries with low access to sanitation, an absolute policy priority is creating demand for toilets. Giving people free or heavily subsidised toilets has repeatedly been shown to fail. This is because if people do not have genuine ownership of its construction, and if they are not adequately taught why sanitation is beneficial, they may not use their shiny new toilet (or may use it for something else, like a store-room…).

Many people argue persuasively that there is still place for some subsidies, particularly for the extreme poor, but that is a discussion for another day. So, creating demand is the key, and zero-subsidy approaches like Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS, see link here) have been proven to create demand effectively in Timor-Leste. But what about supply? It is no good creating lots of demand for sanitation if there is nowhere for people to buy the necessary parts. A lot of attention has therefore recently been given to the idea of ‘sanitation marketing’. This is the concept of treating sanitation as a product to be made attractive and sold by the private sector, meaning anyone who can make adequate parts. The approach involves creating demand through modern marketing techniques, but also ensuring a sustainable supply through support to small-scale sanitation masons.

The most basic pit latrines are essentially free, because most parts can be made from wood and stones which are both easily available. But these materials do not produce a good product which will last much longer than a year. Simple pit latrines can also smell. In short, whilst simple pit latrines are a crucial first step on the ‘sanitation ladder’ they are simply not desirable. People who aspire to modernity and development want a proper toilet which does not smell, but this requires more complex technology, which of course costs money.

Generally, people in Timor-Leste equate a ‘proper’ toilet with porcelain pour-flush pans imported from Indonesia. But these are expensive, and can cost up to $15 in Dili, which doesn’t include the cost of getting them to the rural areas where most people without sanitation live. This is simply unaffordable when half of the population here live on less than $1.25 a day. So how to bridge the gap between a wooden shack with a hole, and an imported porcelain pour-flush pan?

The answer is to build local sanitation markets; training masons to produce products which people want, at an affordable price. WaterAid has recently been investing ‘start-up’ capital in sanitation masons in Liquiça district, such as the roadside sanitation shop in the photo above. The people who run this shop have a furniture business alongside their sanitation shop. In their shop, they sell the moulded cement pans (as shown in the picture) for $5 each, and make a decent profit on each one which creates an incentive to do marketing across the community to get more people to buy them.

It’s early days, but they’ve sold 40 or so in the last few months, and Oxfam recently got Januario, the entrepreneur, to train some other masons in another district. I’ll write a longer post on Januario’s shop in a few weeks

Bagoroto gravity scheme – pipes and tanks

A few weeks ago, Dinesh, José and I went with some staff from WaterAid’s partner HTL to review a recently installed project in Bagaroto, which is in Maubara sub-district of Liquiça, about an hour west of Dili. The picture above is one of the houses in the village. It was an interesting experience for me, because whilst I have seen rural water systems before in Zambia, Madagascar and Nepal, this was the first time I had seen a ‘gravity scheme’.

Gravity schemes are common here as Timor is a very hilly country. It rains a lot in the mountains, and springs rise which can be capped and the water piped down to the villages. Timorese have actually been doing this for centuries with bamboo half-pipes, but they break easily and the water is open to contamination.

The main advantage of a modern gravity scheme (beyond secure pipes) is the big cement tank, which is normally placed uphill just outside the settlement. These tanks are quite large and ensure that, even if the spring doesn’t provide much water in the dry season, a decent supply of water can be saved in the tank for some time.It also ensures that there is good water pressure in the tapstands which are installed very close to the houses.


This system in Bagaroto was a great example of a gravity scheme. It had been installed a few months earlier by HTL, one of WaterAid’s local partner NGOs. Most International NGOs like WaterAid work with local partners as it’s the most sustainable way of doing things. The local NGOs are best-placed to understand their national context, and their organisational capacity is strengthened through long-term funding arrangements.

We were there to check up on the scheme a few months after installation, and fortunately everything was functioning properly. One thing that struck me was the distance which the pipes travel. It was a good 20 minute uphill trek following the pipe up the hillside to the source. As the hillsides are both steep and rain-sodden, landslides are common, see e.g. the picture above. This was an old landslide which was now very stable, and the partner had skilfully placed the pipes to skirt round the outside.

After a sweaty trek we finally arrived at the capped spring (see picture), and everything was in order. Whilst doing the trek up the hill, it struck me what back-breaking work carrying water up such hillsides must be. Before this scheme, the villagers had to trek 400m down the steep hill into the valley, and then back up again carrying containers of water.


I say ‘villagers’ but really I should have said ‘women’. Unfortunately, fetching water is seen as women’s work in most of the world. This is one key reason why water supply interventions are good for gender equality, freeing up women’s time to do other things, and meaning that girls aren’t kept away from school. The new tapstands in Bagoroto are all within 10m of the houses (see a photo of a tapstand at the top of this post), meaning that collecting water is no longer a chore.

The challenge now is making sure that the system is sustainable. East Timor has one of the worst failure rates of water schemes that I have ever encountered. Recent surveys by Plan and Oxfam suggest that up to two thirds of schemes fail within a year or two, which beats sub-Saharan Africa hands down. There are many reasons for this, which I’ll cover in another post. You can be sure however, that WaterAid Timor-Leste and its partners monitor their schemes carefully to pick up any issues as they arise.

Mountain biking in East Timor

East Timor’s tourist agency is trying hard to market the country as a haven for mountain bikers, and doing a pretty good job of it. This year’s Tour de Timor was a resounding success, and hopefully the event will get bigger and better in years to come. I only wish I had arrived here a few months earlier so I could have participated!

I’ve only been here a few weeks but have already managed to borrow a bike from my boss Dinesh and have done a few rides with him. He’s been here for five years so knows some excellent routes. The country is pretty hilly, so most routes involve cycling up a long steep road being overtaken by crammed mikrolets (minibuses), then coming back down a rocky off-road track at high speed.

I hope to do a lot more riding, but it’s going to get harder and harder as the annual rains intensify over the next few weeks. This tends to destroy a lot of the roads, and turn the tracks into mudbaths. Anyway, here are a few photos of rides so far…

Brief history of East Timor

The Wikipedia page on the history of East Timor is good, but here’s my own potted history of this small, beautiful country. So as to fit the history of a very complicated nation into a single blog post, I have cut many corners, for which I apologise. However, I have included the things which I think are most important.

Five hundred years of Portuguse colonialism ended abruptly in 1975 when, after a revolution in Portgual, the colonisers left in a hurry. Neighbouring Indonesia (which itself had gained independence from the Netherlands only a few decades earlier) was already making plans to “integrate” East Timor.

After a brief period of declared independence, Indonesia invaded at the end of 1975. The Timorese put up resistance, but it was no contest. So, between 1975-99 the country was officially part of Indonesia. However, a committed and fairly effective resistance movement called Falintil continued to harass the Indonesian military with varying levels of success over that time.

The repression in Indonesia’s newest province was fairly brutal. Estimates vary, but there is general agreement that at least 100,000 people died as a result of the occupation, which is a huge number considering the population was 500,000 in 1980. The most famous atrocity is the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre of at least 250 people, which put East Timor in the headlines across the world.

After the Asian financial crisis and the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, Timorese independence seemed a real possibility. Eventually, Indonesia agreed to a referendum in 1999.

What happened in the months before and after the referendum was a tragedy, and is extremely complex. Thousands of people were murdered and 200,000 people (a quarter of the population) displaced. I would suggest reading this part of the Wikipedia article on the occupation. For a full and gripping treatment of the period, I would recommend this book by Irena Cristalis.

Essentially, Indonesian-armed anti-independence militias rampaged through the country, intimidating, beating and killing people. There were actually militias on both sides, and Falintil’s record over its history is not spotless, but the general consensus is that Indonesia acted particularly monstrously during this time.

Indonesian intelligence had suggested that people would vote for “integration” but it was hopelessly wrong – the Timorese voted for independence in their droves, with the eventual result being around 80%. So the violence got worse. A particularly horrible incident happened in the southern town of Suai, when up to 200 people taking refuge in a church were murdered by a pro-integration militia.

Eventually, the UN had to step in with a peacekeeping force, and they ran the show from 1999 until the country received full independence in 2002. The UN still maintains a heavy presence here, and only now is it handing over control of the police force in parts of the country. The UN mandate expires in 2012.

After independence there has been further instability, but since 2006 things have been pretty good. East Timor’s status as “post-conflict” and a “fragile state” means that it has attracted a lot of attention and money from donor agencies and NGOs.

A post covering current political situation will follow soon.

(photo - Falintil in the 90s, credit: margheritatracanelli.com.au)

Why am I in East Timor?

In my last post I set out why WaterAid is working here. But why I am here, a foreigner with no experience of the country or region? Paradoxically, the reason is that WaterAid’s policy is to employ local staff as far as possible, to strengthen the capacity of the sector in the long term.

Policy and advocacy work demands certain skills which are hard to find here due to the history (more on that later). I've worked on policy and advocacy for WaterAid in the UK for three years, supporting many of our country programmes across Africa and Asia. So, I am here on a 6-month secondment to train up a promising Timorese graduate, pass on my knowledge and experience, and set them on the right path.

WaterAid’s programme work in East Timor (which I summarise as ‘taps and toilets’) has been moving from strength to strength over the last 5 years, but policy and advocacy work are increasingly been seen as a priority. This is both in terms of the national context and the overall direction of WaterAid’s new global strategy for 2009-15

So what is policy and advocacy work? I tend to characterise is as efforts to influence what others in the water and sanitation sector are doing, but also the government’s broader development strategies (e.g. in health or education). Put simply, it means (i) making sure that water and sanitation is given the priority it deserves, and (ii) all the money allocated to it is being spent well.

To put that in context, WaterAid spends about US$1m a year on ‘taps and toilets’ in East Timor, but in 2011 approximately $80m will be spent on water and sanitation here by the government and donors. That makes WaterAid’s a fairly small proportion of all the money being spent. It is therefore a good investment to spend time influencing the ‘sector’ to ensure that the other $79m is spent well.

There is a lot to be done. Recent surveys by Oxfam and Plan indicated that up to two-thirds of new water systems here may break down within a year, an atrociously high figure caused by a number of factors. Furthermore, rumour has it that the government is set to increase its budget for water and sanitation from $19m in 2010 to close to $60m in 2011. Let’s be clear, that is excellent. This government has truly prioritised water and sanitation, recognising the low levels of access as one of the biggest barriers to development. But it remains to be seen whether the sector has the capacity to scale up that quickly.

In summary, I’m here for the next 6 months to support José our budding Policy and Advocacy Officer. We’ll be working hard to ensure that WaterAid’s knowledge and experience, built up over nearly 30 years, can contribute to a vibrant water and sanitation sector here in East Timor.

Why does WaterAid work in East Timor?

East Timor is a very poor country. Rates of access to water and sanitation here are amongst the lowest in the world. Consequently, WaterAid has prioritised it, and money has been flowing into programmes from WaterAid Australia for about 5 years.

The country’s official name is “Timor-Leste” which is in Portuguese, the national language (more on the linguistic contortions here later), but I’ll use “East Timor” because it’s the name most commonly known in the English-speaking world. East Timor is one of the world’s youngest nations, having had a particularly traumatic birth in 2002 (more on that in another post), and is a very poor country. According to a UNDP report earlier in 2010, 53% of Timorese live on less than $1.25 a day (PPP). [1]

Take a moment to think about how little $1.25 actually is, then consider that half the people here live on even less than that. This is the highest poverty rate in South East Asia, and close to the highest in Asia (there is no data for Afghanistan and Burma). To put things in perspective, East Timor is lower in the Human Development Index (HDI) than Uganda, Malawi and Bangladesh. For more on the country and its history, there are good overviews from Wikipedia and the BBC.

Despite its traumatic birth and recent instability, the country seems to be on quite a firm footing these days. People are optimistic, and there has not been any widespread violence since 2006. The economy is picking up, buoyed by recent successful oil exploration, but the majority of people are still desperately poor. There will most likely be a need for support from donors and NGOs for some time to come.

So, that’s why WaterAid is here. Why I am here will be covered in the next post…

[1] UNDP (2010) Asia-Pacific Human Development Report 2010