JOHNSON, Mr Andrew Duncan, Government Relations Team Leader, World Vision Australia

CHAIR: Welcome. Before proceeding to questions, I invite you to make a short opening statement.

Mr Johnson : Thanks. World Vision Australia welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the inquiry and for the opportunity to appear here today. As you are probably aware, World Vision is an international Christian humanitarian organisation focused on working with local communities on community based development.

World Vision Timor-Leste is part of the World Vision partnership. We began work in Timor-Leste in 1996 in the Alieu district south of Dili, and in September 1999 we set up our office in Dili. We now work in three regions across the country—Alieu; Bobonaro, in the west; and Baucau, in the east. Our work is grant funded, with a range of government and other organisations, including AusAID, through the AusAID NGO Cooperation Program, or ANCP. The focus of the work is on three sectors: health, including water, sanitation, hygiene and maternal, newborn and child health; education; and community economic development, including food security and climate change adaptation.

The office in Timor-Leste has experienced steady growth over the past few years and now has a budget of $7 million annually. World Vision Australia's relationship with the office in Timor-Leste has grown in recent years due to the agreement to implement what is known as the World Vision Pacific Timor-Leste office based in Brisbane that will coordinate all of World Vision's work in the Pacific and Timor-Leste.

The focus of our submission has been in two areas. First, the submission looks at a range of high-level indicators, including child mortality, maternal mortality and life expectancy, all of which are crucial to achieving the MDGs, particularly MDGs 2, 4 and 5, which are focused on education and child and maternal health. The second part of the submission focuses on our work in Timor-Leste and seeks to provide some examples of the outcomes we are seeking from our work. The focus of our work has been seeking to work with the poorest in Timor-Leste, practically those in remote communities where infrastructure provides significant challenges. As I mentioned, we are a community based NGO focused on community driven development, therefore we are investing both in the basic needs like health and education along with capacity-building work such as improving crop yields, crop diversification, savings groups, local value chain development and climate adaptation work.

Our view is that, while the challenges in Timor-Leste are great, the future is bright for the people there. Despite having come through a significant period of instability, great progress is being made. This is demonstrated in our submission by the significant improvements in areas such as halving child mortality and maternal mortality rates over the last 10 years and the significant progress in education access and food production. However, there are still huge development needs in Timor-Leste, especially in relation to rural services and employment.

Australia has a unique and special relationship with the people of Timor and we believe there are significant opportunities for Australia to make a continuing contribution. I am happy to seek to answer any questions you may have or to take on notice any questions I am unable to answer and arrange for answers. Thanks very much.

CHAIR: Thank you, Mr Johnson.

Senator MOORE: Mr Johnson, you are aware of the AusAID change in the way it is has its relationship with East Timor since 2011 and the change to work on the priorities as spelt out by the Timorese government.

Mr Johnson : Yes.

Senator MOORE: World Vision was one of the earliest Australian or Australian linked NGOs working there. Has that change caused any change in the way you operate on the ground? Has there been any difference from pre-2011 to post-2011 because of that change?

Mr Johnson : Our model of working is community based. It has always been based on working with local communities on the basis of their needs, so we have always worked in a way that has sought to engage with the needs of the local community. I am certainly aware that there are a number of partnerships in more recent times that we have been able to strike with various ministries in the East Timorese government in our food security work and our health work and also, but I can check this, in our education work. So I am not sure that that particular change has made a significant difference, but certainly the strengthening of East Timor's government has helped us in seeking to strike those arrangements.

Senator MOORE: Another issue is the number of players who are involved working in support of East Timor. There are a large number of NGOs and there are international NGOs. I see you are getting funding through Japan and New Zealand, so you are getting money for your programs through them rather than yet another NGO being in the field.

Mr Johnson : Yes.

Senator MOORE: That is linked also to the large number of friendship groups from Australia. I think the number of organisations and local councils that have a particular relationship with East Timor is unprecedented. From the perspective of World Vision, how do you see that working on the ground in terms of coordination and sharing and a sense of what it is like working in East Timor? How do you avoid the problems of falling over each other and competing for different areas? How do you perceive that working from World Vision's point of view

Mr Johnson : One is to understand World Vision's federated model. That is the reason we have funding from lots of different governments and other sources. We do not work as World Vision Australia in East Timor, we work as World Vision Timor-Leste. That means that any partnerships that are struck by World Vision offices around the world are all coordinated through our work on the ground there. I am certainly aware that World Vision has good relationships on the ground with other NGOs and organisations. That is a place of continued conversation in relation to coordination. The other thing to be aware of in relation to World Vision's model is that we only work in communities where we have reached partnership agreements with the communities to work with them locally. We see that as a way of avoiding duplication or multiple people. If a community is working with someone else, it is not appropriate for us to work there and we find somewhere else to work. Those are two ways in which World Vision seeks to deal with overlap and coordination issues.

Senator MOORE: On the ground, is there a link with the Australian embassy?

Mr Johnson : Yes. We have an office based in Dili, so there are relationships with the Australian government in Dili.

Senator MOORE: Your head office is in Dili and you have the other two regions where you have services. What is the make-up of the people who are being employed—those locally engaged and those from outside?

Mr Johnson : I have the exact numbers here. The total staffing of World Vision Timor-Leste is about 250, and 237 of those are Timorese and 13 are expatriate staff. That was in January 2013. Of those 250, 45 work in the office in Dili and 205 are field based staff, based around the country. At the moment it is led by a country director and there are also operations and program departments.

Senator MOORE: The country director is from where? You can take that on notice.

Mr Johnson : I will take that on notice.

Senator MOORE: That would be a significant employer, would it not, in terms of paid employment within the current East Timor model?

Mr Johnson : As you can see, quite a significant number are East Timorese. A very small percentage of our staff are external.

Dr STONE: You have a very significant workforce in Timor-Leste. It is good to hear how many local people you have engaged. How are they trained? Are the people you employ locally given specific training programs or are they already skilled in what you aim them to do? What sort of staff are they? Obviously, there is community development in some form.

Mr Johnson : We have technical specialists in areas in which we work—food security, health, nutrition, wash and education—and there are also monitoring and evaluation staff. There are also all the operational staff that you would normally expect to find. Our approach has been to engage people on the basis of the technical expertise that they bring and the needs that we have, but across the World Vision partnership we also have very thorough succession planning and personal development of staff approaches.

Dr STONE: So you would tend to employ persons who have already gained skills and qualifications?

Mr Johnson : Yes.

Dr STONE: In terms of the three areas that you are working in, how did you choose those? Do they have markedly different outcomes in things like child and mother mortality, levels of nutrition, stunting and so on compared to other areas? Are you able to do any comparisons—you have been active for 17 years—compared to neighbouring areas perhaps?

Mr Johnson : Yes, we do monitoring and evaluation. I can get you some details in terms of the outcomes we have. Unfortunately, I only have a draft of our annual report, so that is still confidential, but that does have some results in it. In terms of the choice of sectors, there are a number of factors. As I mentioned, we work with local communities, so our area development program model is to work with local communities to identify, in partnership with them, what their needs are. The other thing that impacts upon the choices that we make is that we work where we have expertise and experience. We are implementing a number of programs—for example, in child health and nutrition—where we have seen success elsewhere. For example, our 7-11 strategy based around seven key interventions for mothers and 11 key interventions for children has been implemented elsewhere. It has been shown to be successful and it is an area in which we have expertise.

It is the same in our education work. It is focused on early childhood care and development. That is something that we do in a lot of places around the world and in which we have experience and expertise. It is the same with our food security work and our economic development work. We are implementing our savings groups model and our value chain development model. They are things in which we have experience in other places that we implement.

Our other focus has always been on where the poorest are and the greatest need is. That is why you will notice that we are based in some more remote and difficult-to-get-to locations in seeking to deal with those core aspects of child and maternal mortality, enrolment in school and those kinds of things.

Dr STONE: Do you include family planning advice and support in your maternal health area?

Mr Johnson : I do not have details on that right in front of me, but I can take that on notice and check for you.

Dr STONE: Yes—particularly contraceptive advice and family spacing advice.

Mr Johnson : Yes.

Dr STONE: In terms of your nutrition and food aid work, do you deliver food aid itself or are you more involved in trying to build the capacity of farmers?

Mr Johnson : Certainly, during the emergency period in 1999, we were involved in the distribution of emergency relief. But our food security work—there is a memorandum of understanding with the relevant department in East Timor—is particularly focused on capacity building, increasing yields, income-generating crops and that kind of thing. You can see from our submission, in one of the case studies we have provided there, that there are two parts to that: one is the income generation and generating crops that can be sold, and the other is the improvement of nutrition locally, in local communities. So that is the focus of our food security work, and that tends to be the way our food security work works.

Dr STONE: So, even though they have some of the highest levels of malnutrition in the world, the highest levels of stunting and five to six months of very little food, you don't deliver any school lunches, say, or food support for lactating women or whatever—it's all about growing a better crop?

Mr Johnson : Some of our maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition work is focused on improving childhood nutrition, but that is separate from, say, our food security work, which is trying to increase yields and nutritional value.

Dr STONE: To cut a very long story short, I am just wondering: although your workers are surrounded by extreme examples sometimes of malnutrition, particularly among babies and lactating mothers, you do not deliver any actual food aid as an interim measure, like powdered milk from Australia?

Mr Johnson : Yes, we do, but it is part of our maternal, newborn and child health work. We certainly do at our health clinics and that kind of thing.

Dr STONE: You give out some foodstuffs—

Mr Johnson : Yes.

Dr STONE: to those most in need?

Mr Johnson : Yes—in situations of severe malnutrition, yes.

Dr STONE: Okay. How do you work with local policing? Say, if you are seeing—as I am sure you would—family abuse, abuse of women—domestic violence—do you work with local policing agents to try and give better protection in the areas you work in?

Mr Johnson : My understanding is that we do that kind of work in various parts of the world. We do not have any child protection work like that based in East Timor, no.

Dr STONE: Is that something you have thought about from time to time, given the levels of violence?

Mr Johnson : I would need to check.

Dr STONE: Okay. You talked about early childhood work. Do you actually run early childhood or what we in Australia might call preschool education programs?

Mr Johnson : Yes. We have an early childhood care and development model, and we do have centre based care but also home based care and mobile care situations. So, yes, we do that kind of work.

Dr STONE: Like infant welfare type mobile care?

Mr Johnson : Also early childhood education.

Dr STONE: So it is a preschool situation you actually offer.

Mr Johnson : Yes, depending on the situation and in a culturally appropriate way.

Dr STONE: Right. What languages do your staff typically speak? Are they operating in local languages or do you expect them to speak Portuguese, officially, when they are working with their counterparts in Dili?

Mr Johnson : It depends on the circumstances, but we do what is locally and culturally appropriate. My experience in East Timor has been that, even in situations where they might speak a local language, there is still a local dialect, so it is very much dependent on the local situation and what is most culturally appropriate for the situation.

Dr STONE: Thank you. You will get back to us on the family planning issues.

Mr Johnson : Yes, I have made a note of that.

Dr STONE: And the child protection issues.

Mr Johnson : And the child protection issues, yes. Thank you.

CHAIR: Thanks for your attendance here today.

Mr Johnson : No worries.

CHAIR: If there are any matters that we might need additional information on, the secretary will write to you. The secretary will send you a copy of the transcript of your evidence, to which you can make any necessary corrections to errors of transcription. Thank you very much for being here.