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
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