CAIRO, 16 April 2004 — The World Bank’s drive to revive Iraq’s weakened economy should not suffer serious delay because of the spiraling violence in the country, the head of the bank’s mission to Iraq said yesterday.
Faris Hadad-Zervos told Reuters in an interview that a breakdown in law and order might hamper the bank’s efforts to rebuild, but reliance on Iraqis would keep the process going. “There is no doubt the existing security situation is a precarious one and raises some obstacles for us in terms of logistics,” said the official who is overseeing a $400 million interim program from World Bank offices in Jordan. “But the World Bank’s reliance on Iraqis to implement mitigates against a serious delay in the work program...For us, the Iraqis are there and they are the driving force.”
Emergency rehabilitation and reconstruction of Iraq are top priorities in the World Bank’s six-to-nine month operation that began early this year. Another aim of the interim program is training Iraqi civil servants to oversee and spend aid. Decades of economic mismanagement have led some international donors to argue that Iraq will be unable to handle billions of dollars of aid.
But Hadad-Zervos said much of the required training of Iraqis on project implementation, procurement and financial management had been finished before a wave of violence disrupted travel between Baghdad and World Bank offices in Jordan.
“Up until last week, we had a steady flow of people...This is only a hiccup rather than a serious setback,” he said, adding that only two training sessions have so far been postponed.
More than 130 Iraqis have graduated from a training course designed to build the government’s ability to run aid projects, and carry out social and environmental impact analyses, under strict international accountability and management codes. “We have done a lot of work,” Hadad-Zervos said.
The World Bank is keeping in close contact with Iraqis working on the emergency rehabilitation program through continued meetings, local staff, videoconferences and other communication links.
The official could not assess whether the recent violence had cooled the appetite of non-US donors to honor their commitment to identify which projects they would fund.
A follow up meeting of donors set for the latter part of May in the Qatari capital of Doha will be another occasion to assess properly the speed of the flow of the other donor funds, he said.
An international donors’ conference last year in Madrid saw lending pledges led by the United States mount to $33 billion over four years for Iraqi reconstruction. Washington has said it would commit about $10 billion of its $18.6 billion pledge to Iraqi reconstruction by July.
In February, non-US donors said they would go ahead and inject the first $1 billion of their contributions into two trust funds run by the United Nations and the World Bank.
