Zahira Kharsany and Francis Kokutse

Accra, Sept 5 (IPS) A government minister from the world’s youngest nation – and also one of its poorest – told a meeting of powerful global bankers today exactly how hard it is to extract aid from rich countries.

Emilia Pires, Minister of Finance of Timor Leste – or East Timor – told the 3rd High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in the Ghanaian capital yesterday conditionalities and bureaucracy made it difficult to obtain foreign aid that is sorely needed to develop her country.

Poverty affects two in five people in this East Asian nation of nearly a million, predominantly in the rural areas. Speaking to an audience that included World Bank President Robert Zoellick, the minister said when she took over office she had to develop the country’s first development plan.

To do that she had to amalgamate a large number of disparate plans into one. After handing over the plan to a donor she did not name, Pires said, she asked the donor to give her a response in three days.

"They said they had to give it to their head office. I told them that I had not drawn it up with a lawyer present and if they were going to show their lawyers I wanted mine. "The supposed three days turned into a year-and-a-half," Pires said.

Pires’s comments came on a day the president of Ghana, John Kufuor, urged donor nations not to delay agreeing aid plans, saying such prevarication threatened fledgling democracies.

Donor country support, he said, "should manifest in the timeous release of resources for critical programmes in the shared country plans.

"For delays in the implementation of programmes that society has bought into frustrate expectations and tend to cause political disenchantment and render governments, especially a democratically elected leadership, vulnerable," Kufuor said.

The World Bank’s Zoellick told delegates that on leaving the Forum they should find "practical steps" and solutions for mouting food and fuel prices.

"It is common sense that we must try and make aid better," he said. He said for aid-recipient countries to be in the "driver seat" of aid programmes they would have to put in place the right programmes as well as the right structures and frameworks.

"National ownership must be matched with national accountability," he said. Zoellick called for the removal of all taxes that hinder aid programmes and delays the disbursement of food. He called for donors to be flexible and more innovative in the way they approached aid.