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Overview
Post-conflict reconstruction is not new to the World Bank. In fact, the Bank's first loan was to the Government of France to rebuild the country after World War II. What is new, is the rapidly increasing number of post-conflict areas, and the enormity and complexity of rebuilding in each case. To better assist post-conflict areas in the future, the Bank is studying past experiences in dealing with post-conflict reconstruction. This volume represents one in a series. The other volumes discuss post-conflict reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina and El Salvador. Although the Bank played a significant role in assisting with post-conflict reconstruction in each country, the causes of state failure or collapse differ. Also different are the factors that influenced the initiation or resumption of Bank operations. This publication focuses on the World Bank's experience in Uganda.
Synopsis
World Bank involvement in the reconstruction efforts in Uganda have been particularly comprehensive. In the first five years after the conflict (1987-92), the Bank supported approximately 25 lending operations and was key in strengthening the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank, removing the monopoly of the Coffee Board, assisting in sugar rehabilitation, and rebuilding roads. Despite good performance in reforming and rebuilding the economy, there have been several respects in which Bank involvement could have been improved: consensus building; use of conditionalities; and, most important, in emphasizing taxation. The Bank did not fulfill its role in strengthening the power sector nor did it fully convert its coordination role into creating an overall reconstruction strategy or a sector-by-sector plan. The Bank ' s performance was relatively poor in the social sectors, particularly in strengthening health and education institutions. project shortcomings concerned Bank processes and institutional arrangements: Project design needed to be process-oriented and reflect Uganda ' s unsettled institutional environment, particularly in the social sectors where the education and health ministries were too weak to accommodate spending, and supervening events such as decentralization and renewed conflict changed priorities. Also, projects failed to adjust for differing timetables: where they were not sequential, timetables were too short to address the projected length of recovery.