Abstract
Final evaluation of the Office of Transition Initiatives' (OTI) East Timor community stabilization programs, comprising the Transition Engagement for Population Support Program (TEPS II) and the follow-on Building Empowerment, Leadership and Engagement (BELE) program. Implemented over a 15-month period (10/01-12/02), these programs focused on community participation in identifying, implementing, and completing subprojects based on small grants. TEPS II and BELE activities have generally succeeded in breaking some bottlenecks and filling critical gaps in the functioning of selected communities in a transitioning East Timor society. Grants in agriculture (including some agro-processing activities), schools, markets, and water and sanitation were especially successful in responding to perceived critical needs and in mobilizing people's efforts. Less obviously responsive and demanding of people's energies were roads, selected income generation activities, and sports facilities (based, however, on only one site visit). Income generation activities included carpentry shops, rice milling operations, a hand-tractor activity, a brick-making factory, and a coffee production cooperative. Agricultural irrigation activities seemed to strike a responsive chord, in part because the result is so visible. The exit strategy for TEPS II and BELE should consciously tie the economic stability of communities to a process of local government and governance. Such a linkage represents an appropriate approach to empowering the disenfranchised farmers of rural East Timor. USAID/East Timor should design a strategy to develop local government capacity that promotes not only electoral democracy and democratic governance, but also transparency and accountability of an eventual rural service delivery program. Lessons learned are as follows: (1) Small grants programs such as TEPS II and BELE can support a society in transition, filling critical socioeconomic gaps and building local empowerment. (2) A community transition program that does not consciously build on a partnership with some local supportive organization or institution may be difficult to sustain. Admittedly, TEPS II and BELE found such local partners to be few and far between. (3) Grant activities that engaged the local village or sub-village chief often had a better chance of success than those that did not, even if full transparency and accountability were not attached to that position. (4) While community-generated activities represent a highly appropriate approach to a transition program, some community bottlenecks or gaps may be more critical than others. (5) While breaking dependency may be a long term goal of development programs, there may be ways to consciously attack that problem sooner as part of the transition process. (6) When procurement considerations begin to drive a grant, they may lead to inferior inputs, thereby jeopardizing grant results, as seemed to be the case with the rice mills. (7) Income generation grants are not proven as a tool in transition projects, yet results achieved through these grants may be useful, even if they do not contribute directly to income (e.g., some of the agro-processing grants were productive in non-income ways). (8) While evaluations such as this one can have real value to transition program designers, they often fail to penetrate beneath the surface of a grant activity. (9) In the absence of a partnership with local government institutions, programs designed to fill gaps in East Timor's economic infrastructure may be unsustainable due to a lack of formal, accountable structure to support and maintain them.