Memorandum submitted by Development Workshop
Angola (DWA)
POST-CONFLICT
ANGOLA
Development Workshop was invited by the Angolan
government to establish a programme in Angola in 1981 and from
that time worked for several years as the only NGO in the country.
Development Workshop's origins date back to 1973 when a concerned
group of international students at the AA in London came together
to work on settlement challenges of communities in developing
countries. In 1988 Development Workshop Angola became one of the
first NGOs to be legally registered in Angola. Since then Development
Workshop Angola has expanded significantly and now has projects
in the areas of water and sanitation, supporting to the development
of the livelihoods of vulnerable sectors of the population (and
particularly women), peace-building, reconstruction of local social
infrastructure, and support to community initiatives and local
NGOs. Development Workshop Angola, is one of the implementing
partners with One World Action, of the DFID-funded Luanda Urban
Poverty Programme[73].
DWA also works with Christian Aid and DFID funding on the Angola
Peacebuilding Programme in support of Angolan churches and civil
society on peace consolidation and post-war reintegration. The
FCO also supports Development Workshop Angola in a project of
participatory urban land tenure management in the war affected
Central Highland province of Huambo. DWA has carried our extensive
research with support from CEHS in Edinburgh on post-conflict
issues of land rights in Angola and has contributed to the development
of new Angolan legislation on land.
Development Workshop Angola welcomes the opportunity
to provide evidence to the House of Commons' International Development
Committee Inquiry on Conflict and Development: Peacebuilding and
Post-Conflict Reconstruction. We particularly welcome the special
invitation to organisations with relevant experience and expertise
from developing countries. We would like to provide evidence to
the Inquiry based on our twenty-five year experience of working
in Angola.
Angola has been at peace for almost four years
after almost 40 years of continuous conflict. Angola had over
the previous decade experienced several cycles of attempts at
peace which failed and resulted in the return to conflict. The
infrastructure of the country has been devastated directly by
the war and indirectly by the lack of capacity to maintain it
during war. There have been massive population movements, particularly
to the towns and cities along the Atlantic coast. The achievement
of peace means that the challenge of reconstruction can begin
to be addressed, but it does not mean that Angola will rapidly
spring back into the way it was before conflict. There are many
signs that donor agencies (including DFID) are reducing their
engagement in Angola. The heavy involvement of the donor community
in providing humanitarian assistance to Angola between 1992 and
2002 has not been translated into significant involvement in reconstruction.
It appears to Development Workshop that many donor agencies are
taking an over-optimistic view of how quickly normality is being
re-established (or can be re-established) in a post-conflict situation
such as Angola. Agencies appear to have underestimated the complexity,
time and resources needed to invest in post-conflict transition.
They also appear to be relying on the scanty data that exists
about war-affected areas of Angola and interpreting it in an over-optimistic
way. It appears to Development Workshop that many donor agencies
are not paying enough attention to the risks that exist for post-conflict
States to slip back into conflict. And it also appears that many
donor agencies are assuming that the Government of Angola, with
access to oil revenues, should be able to manage the post-conflict
transition on its own.
Two-thirds of families in Angola live below
the poverty-line. Despite Angolan's increasing oil income in the
last couple years our own surveys show that the average family
has about one dollar per person per day to live on. This is because
the most common livelihood strategies are still in fact low income
survival strategies. Most surveys show that people who have gone
back to farming in rural areas are only cultivating small amounts
of land (because of a lack of inputs and capital and the difficulties
of bringing land back into cultivation) and are producing less
food than the needs of their families. However many people have
not gone back to rural areas, although aid agencies appear to
assume that they have. They have not gone back because of the
difficulties for re-integration outlined above, because of the
lack of infrastructure and services, because of land mines, and
because the communities who lived in rural areas have been dispersed
by the war. There are thus substantial numbers of people living
from low-paid casual employment (paying about one dollar per day)
and from very small-scale retail trading. There is a lack of skills
and as yet a low capacity to transform these low value-added activities.
While aid agency reports speak of people "re-integrating",
they are in fact experiencing great difficulty in re-establishing
satisfactory and sustainable livelihoods. It is unrealistic to
speak of "re-integration" when the economic, social
and institutional framework has been destroyed by a prolonged
conflict leaving no framework in which people can integrate themselves.
We are therefore concerned about donor agency language that assumes
that people are going back to their areas of origin and re-integrating,
and are concerned that this leads to an underestimation of the
times and resources that will need to be invested in Angola's
post-conflict transition.
There are now a large number of studies that
indicate that post-conflict countries are at risk of sliding back
into conflict. We are concerned that donor agencies are not paying
sufficient attention to the risks of further conflict in Angola.
There has been a process of reconciliation at the national level
between the warring parties but this was, in effect, a military
victory by one of the parties and has been followed by a growing
distance between the national level of the two forming warring
parties and their base. The fact that the war ended by military
methods means that there was no peace process that revealed the
underlying local factors that were behind the war, and may have
been exacerbated by the war. The risk is that these factors continue
to fester and contribute to a future conflict. Among the conflict-risk
factors are:
— poverty, vulnerability and unmet
expectation[74];
— weak institutions, namely weak rules,
procedures and mechanisms for defining access to resources and
managing conflicts[75];
— competition for access to resources
as part of survival strategies[76];
and
— groups of people with different interests
and values, and with few points of mediation, competing for the
same resources.
Globalisation means that there are international
actors (investors, migrants from other areas of Africa) coming
into the picture. Displacement during war, and continued migration
within Angola in search of survival strategies, can mean different
internal groups competing for access to the same resources. Customary
institutions can be overwhelmed in trying to deal with competing
demands for access to resources and by conflict-resolution, where
the groups involved come from different backgrounds and identities
and hold different values[77].
There are thus a number of conflict risk factors in Angola. These
may or may not lead to another violent conflict: they are however
highly likely to be a block to development as different interest
groups have difficulty in cooperating over development plans,
and we are concerned that donor agencies are not paying sufficient
attention to these risks, which could also sill-over into other
countries.
We are also concerned that donor agencies are
assuming that access to oil revenues should permit the Government
of Angola to manage the post-conflict transition on its own. Financial
capacity is not the only requirement for successful post-conflict
reconstruction and is probably not the most important. Technical
and institutional capacity is vital, but is also weak. There is
a risk that availability of finance can lead the Government of
Angola to contract development projects from outside consultants,
and that these projects do not reflect the reality in the country.
Therefore on the basis of what we have witnessed
in Angola since 2002 we believe that there is still a lack of
coordination among donor agencies and international organisations
about their policies for post-conflict countries. There is still
a high risk of agencies taking uncoordinated decisions about whether
or not to work in a post-conflict country, and this can leave
some countries as donor orphans. We are aware that DFID have been
seeking to improve donor coordination in this area. We would request
that DFID provide further information about progress in this area.
Our observations lead us to believe that donor
agencies have only partially taken on board the risks of not engaging
in post-conflict reconstruction. They also lead us to believe
that there has been only limited progress in developing new instruments
for post-conflict countries. In a newspaper interview about Angola
a donor agency was quoted as saying "Do you expect us still
to provide food aid to Angola?" Clearly food aid is no longer
the priority for Angola, but we are concerned that donor agencies
still see the alternative as being food aid or nothing. We are
concerned that where aid is likely to be supplied outside of bilateral
government to government channels (as it is likely to be in a
post-conflict or fragile state such as Angola) that this is still
thought of as humanitarian aid and the first reaction is to see
the alternative as being food aid or nothing.
We are concerned that donor agency funding to
UN mandate bodies such as WFP, OCHA and UNHCR has been linked
to predetermined timetables and has not taken account of how far
conditions on the ground inside Angola have improved. We are particularly
concerned at the run-down of funding to UNHCR when large numbers
of refugees have just returned to border provinces of Angola where
there are landmines and where infrastructure has been severely
damaged by war. We are concerned that refugees received substantial
support for many years in refugee camps in Zambia and RDC but
have now been relocated to a much more difficult context inside
war-ravaged Angola but are expected to rebuild their lives with
very little support. The assumption would seem to be that they
can easily rebuild their lives because they have returned to the
country where they were born. Observation of their conditions
shows that this is clearly not the case.
We are also concerned that no warning system
has been put in place before the withdrawal of important UN mandate
bodies from Angola. Monitoring progress in post-conflict states
is vital. UNHCT, WFP and OCHA provided useful information about
conditions on the ground in Angola during the war, though of course
the data were limited to accessible areas and focused on a limited
range of indicators of interest to such agencies. There has always
been a lack of reliable information about conditions throughout
the country, and local research capacity is limited. Maintaining
an information system should be a basic requirement for UN involvement
in a post-conflict country, whether or not they maintain any other
programmes.
We are thus disappointed that the interested
shown by donor agencies in post-conflict countries in recent years
(as shown by the DFID document "Why we need to work more
effectively in fragile states" published by the Department
for International Development in January 2005) has not as yet
been translated into a new approach for Angola. We would welcome
greater clarity from DFID (and from other donor agencies) about
their policies towards Angola, whether it is in fact policy to
pull out from Angola and what are the reasons behind this.
We appreciate that new ways of working will
be required for working in post-conflict states. We appreciate
that this will require a greater amount of time and staff resources
than is spent on other countries, though we understood that this
was what DFID intended in its "Why we need to work more effectively
in fragile states" document. We would welcome opportunities
for dialogue with DFID and other donor agencies that might help
to define new approaches and instruments for post-conflict states.
Our opinion is that there continue to be opportunities
for working at a sub-national level in post-conflict states such
as Angola, with projects directly addressing people's lack of
skills, lack of access to services and inadequate survival strategies.
Our opinion is that there are in fact risks in not doing so as
these needs are likely to remain unaddressed and add to existing
conflict risks. Our opinion is that these can be associated with
activities that help to build institutional capacities at a local
level. Development Workshop Angola has considerable experience
of developing rules and procedures for maintaining and managing
local infrastructure (such as water points and schools) involving
various local actors (local government, water companies, customary
community institutions, newly-formed community institutions. This
approach is complementary to the institutional capacity-building
at the national level (in economic management for example, carried
out by the World Bank). Our opinion is that such activities can
also be associated with activities that increase conflict-management
capacity at a local level and that build linkages between different
groups and communities who, as a result of war-induced migration,
now find themselves living in the same place and in potential
conflict.
There are various studies that have been carried
out by the World Bank (in its LICUS programme) and by DFID (in
its work on alternative service delivery mechanisms in fragile
states) that highlight possible approaches and mechanisms for
working at a sub-national level in fragile states and post-conflict
states. Development Workshop Angola would appreciate more opportunities
for dialogue with donor agencies about how to develop these approaches
and mechanisms.
January 2006
73 LUPP is a coalition of CARE, Development Workshop
Angola, One World Action and Save the Children (UK). Back
74
It has been shown that low-income oil producers have a high conflict
risk because expectations are raised but oil revenues are not
sufficiently great to meet those expectations. See Myers, K "Petroleum,
poverty and security". London, Chatham House 2005. Back
75
Institutional weakness at the national level in Angola is due
to the chaotic independence process and the effects of war. Customary
institutions are based on ethnic allegiance and have been weakened
by the movement of population and challenges to them by younger
people who see them as outdated. Informal institutions have developed
to fill the vacuum left by the lack of formal institutions, but
may enter nto conflict with formal institutions, and their procedures
are often unclear. Back
76
Access to wood for charcoal making, access to jobs and scarce
training courses, access to small-scale diamond areas. Back
77
Competing groups may not necessarily be different ethnic groups.
People from the same ethnic group but who have followed different
trajectories over the last 25 years (staying in the same place,
migrating to a town, going to another country as a refugee) may
have different views about the rules for access to local resources. Back
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