MR. NAT COLETTA: What stimulated the Bank's involvement in demobilization or integration of our ex-combatants in Uganda was an adjustment operation. Despite all the criticism that the Bank takes for structural adjustment, this was one case in which it actually worked in favor of things the critics were concerned about. It was an adjustment operation to provide some balance of payments in exchange for financial and economic adjustments, policy adjustments and a distribution of public expenditure.

At that time, Uganda was spending some 38 percent of their operational budget on defense and this was crowding out expenditures that could be made in other sectors particularly education and health. So, with the Bank's new thrust on poverty alleviation, education and health and human capital formation, human development in general, become very critical areas for investment. So, we more or less put the two together in this adjustment operation and said to the Uganda government, we'll go forward with this adjustment balance of payments in exchange for some adjustment in your allocation of public expenditure. That is a reduction in military expenditure and a reallocation to the social sectors in particular.

They agreed. They said that they had at that time reached a level of security that they could afford to downsize their military and then they popped the question back to us at the negotiations. However, the Secretary of Defense said that in our case the implications here are not a high tech army where we're saving on material expenditures for weapons, etc. but really it's a people intensive army and we're talking about cutting the Army from about 100,000 to about 50,000 and the question we have for the Bank is what do we do with these people, especially in an economy that really isn't growing very quickly and we need to reabsorb lest they turn to crime.

So, I was actually plucked out of the Human Resource Department by the Country Director for Uganda and introduced to the Secretary of Defense and said, please get on a plane. Go to Uganda and figure out what we would do that would make sense to demobilize and reintegrate a social and economic reintegration of some 30 to 50,000 ex-combatants and their families. Because in the case of Uganda and most African armies, we're not talking about a traditional army living in barracks and supported by all kinds of amenities, but we're talking about an army on the move whose families quite often are encamping with them, and are a part of the beneficiaries if you will. And that was the beginning of the story of the Bank's involvement with the Uganda government and several other donors in designing a demobilization and reintegration program from the ground up if you will.

MR. GLENN BAKER: I understand that program a couple of years ago -- within the last two years -- essentially finished, the reintegration of successfully as far as I understand it. Was that the -- sort of -- did the Bank's interest in post-conflict issues or perhaps the seed of the idea of this unit, grow out of that experience?

COLETTA: Well, it certainly -- it certainly contributed to the growth. Because that then became a kind of a model on the one hand for many other African countries that were going through a similar process of adjustment and demilitarization and we were called in, and now as some inadvertent, unexpected experts having actually done it in reality. And what we did is use the Ugandan's themselves. I recall in one of my very first sessions with the counterpart Uganda [nep] we were dealing with there who was a former military officer himself, retired. And I told him, "You're going to be the world's expert in this topic. In five years, you'll be all over the world advising other nations." And he thought I was crazy. Well, he subsequently has been in Eritrea and Ethiopia, in Chad, in Djlbouti, in Mozambique, in Angola, all places where we have been somewhat active in designing this kind of program. And I should say beyond Africa -- in Cambodia and in Guatemala as well.

So, this generally, definitely was the seed of a lot of our work as you can see. The country multiplication of just this particular what we might refer to as a product line. But then we expanded off of that into the other war effected populations. It branched out if you will from ex-combatants as one particular segment of the war effected populations to then looking at refugees internally displaced, physically disabled, orphans, war widows, what I would call the whole range of war-effected populations.

BAKER: I have a lot that I want to get through here, so if you could be even more brief.

COLETTA: Okay.

BAKER: And we can move along. And I'll be able to use more of it as well.

COLETTA: Okay. You going to edit out these things a bit.

BAKER: It's going to be -- yeah.

COLETTA: Okay.

BAKER: What lead to the decision specifically to form a separate post conflict unit which has been in existence less than a year I understand.

COLETTA: Well, what happened was is we were getting involved in so many of these conflict countries with such unusual demands from Bosnia and Gaza West Bank to several countries in Africa and Central America and Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Guatemala being two examples. The board said we need to have some kind of a policy or at least a policy framework on our involvement in these countries and that this is different than post-World War II where the Bank, Breton Woods Institutions were actually founded as, if you will, a reconstruction bank. And sometimes we're fond of actually saying that what we're trying to do here is to put the "R" back in the IBRD, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. And the "R" had kind of dropped out over the years, but now we are putting it back. So, as a result of the board's request for a policy framework, you know, we then worked on the policy and as a result of the policy it was quite obvious that what we needed was some kind of central focal point in the Bank for both external partnering with others outside the institution and then within the institution for cross-fertilization and, if you will to leverage the limited at that time expertise that we had across the Bank rather than simply in Africa. Sorry about that phone. This is why I wanted to get to the secretary out there.

BAKER: Do you want to answer it?

COLETTA: I think that's clearly one of the primary needs that all of the donors for sure have seen. And -- because what we have done is picked up various pieces of the problem if you will and have not necessarily had them in the right order of sequencing or have had all of the solutions at one go, if you will, taking a look at a holistic framework of the situation. And now what we see is there are at least three very critical dimensions. One is the political dimension, of course, the diplomatic political dimension. The second one is the security, military dimension and the third one is the social and economic dimension. And what we've been trying to do is build a -- our framework of approaching these countries through seeing the interface of interventions around those three areas.

BAKER: There's been a lot of talk about those conflict re-building being more than just physical reconstruction and it includes, as you say, you know, political, institutional reconciliation issues and so forth. Is the Bank as a whole prepared to embrace this more holistic approach or is there a certain institutional resistance here?

COLETTA: Well, I would say just looking at -- first of all, let me say, yes, the Bank is prepared to embrace this approach and the very fact that social development has become a critical part of our agenda in the overall program of poverty alleviation. You could count the number of social scientists in this institution on one hand even as few as ten years ago, five years ago. And today there are well over a couple hundred social scientists in the institution. It's an entire network family, the social family. It's linked to environment. And it definitely is growing. In this particular area, your -- you had another dimension to that question?

BAKER: I was just wondering if there -- well, let me ask something else. Is there training or education that is being carried out for Bank personnel outside of the social, you know, the sort of standard development staff to reorient to a more sort of multi-disciplinary or broad approach?

COLETTA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in addition to the recruitment angle of the -- of, you know, bringing in more social scientists, I think clearly it's also having an effect on our training programs. We ourselves here in the post-conflict unit are putting together now a major staff development program that would begin looking at, for example, the economics of war torn societies, looking at questions of social and economic integration of war-effected populations, looking at the whole issue of conflict analysis and conflict prevention, focusing, of course, on development as the primary tool for us, at least, in prevention. What we like to refer to sometimes is good development, development that's inclusive, that promotes quality of opportunity and that is highly participatory. We think this, in a way, is the best conflict prevention. So we stay away -- we tend to stay away from the use of politics as a term and diplomacy and preventive diplomacy and try very much to focus on how development and good development, as I suggest, a certain kind of development, can actually promote sustainable peace.

BAKER: One critique of international efforts in general in post-conflict environments is coordination issues or lack of coordination, particularly when you have a transition between a relief element and a development element and that sort of interface. Is the Bank in a position or prepared to take a leadership role in the coordination of efforts by various relief and develop and other international groups in a post-conflict country?

COLETTA: Yes, we're prepared, the Bank is prepared to take a leadership role. I think that's already evidenced by our role in -- our leadership role in Bosnia-Herzegovina, our leadership role, again, in Gaza West Bank. We are now taking the lead on Democratic Republic of Congo, organizing the so-called Friends of Congo, setting up a trust fund, a multi-donor trust fund. But I hasten to add that leadership -- the leadership issue is really very dependent upon, number one, the requests that we take the leadership by the countries, the governments, the acting authorities, and number two, a consensus on the part of the donors that they want us to take the leadership. So, we're very careful to jump out in front and say, plant a flag, a World Bank flag and say, "We are the leaders here." We really want it to be more it to be more [demandru].

BAKER: As I mentioned before we started, I mean, under the charter of the Bank, explicitly avoids involvement in domestic political affairs. And yet in many countries seeking to recover, there is no clear government entity and issues can become overtly political. How do you go about doing your work effectively with early involvement, walking that line?

COLETTA: Yeah. Well, that's probably one of the most difficult problems for us because clearly, number one, we do have some basic criteria for even entry into a situation -- a conflict situation. And one is that there be some clear, recognized, political authority. I say political authority because in the case of Gaza West Bank we have the Palestinian authority which we're dealing with. But there does have to be a recognized -- and that's usually U.N. recognized -- political authority. It's an issue, for example, right now in Afghanistan for us. You know, it's not so clear. The other issue of course is the arrears where countries are in debt and they have not been paying their debt and we need to work with the IMF to help them clear their arrears before we can then reactivate a lending portfolio in the country. So these are two of the major issues.

The last one, I suppose is just basic security. I mean, we do feel that unless we can have assurances that our staff will be secure, we can't send them in.

BAKER: And that would also seem to be a major part of creating a viable post-conflict environment for the indigenous population and creating security.

COLETTA: Absolutely. It was one of the three pillars that I mentioned before in the framework. It's something, by the way, that I don't think that we ourselves can personally do in terms of dealing with financing the reform and/or the establishment of a viable police force, etc. But we can encourage other partners to do this in tandem with the things that we can do -- supporting a demobilization or reintegration program.

BAKER: You mentioned Bosnia earlier. And I guess my understanding is that traditional World Bank assistance went to government entities and yet I understand Bosnia, there is more micro-enterprise support and support programs going under emergency terms that may be different from direct government loans. Can you talk maybe a little bit about small level or individual level support programs in Bosnia?

COLETTA: Yeah, I think --

BAKER: And how they're perhaps different or new.

COLETTA: Yeah. Well, what's happened here is clearly -- in most of these war torn areas, the government has been de-capacitated as such and whether or not there's even a capacity to implement a broad range of programs is one of the major issues, how to revitalize the local institutions and a human capacity field -- banking systems, field of financial intermediation in general, inactive and absent local administrative and governmental apparatus and personnel systems of accounting and auditing and procurement have all broken down. So, yet, there's a tremendous need to respond quickly. So, we have modified substantially procurement, auditing, accounting guidelines without sacrificing, I should say, quality. We've been very careful. I think an important thing in these areas, and Bosnia's a good example, that is to set up a resident mission as quickly as possible so that we do have a presence. And one thing coming out of our policy review was that we need to have a presence and very early to meet the need to respond in the absence of this kind of institutional, lack of institutional capacity. Now, as relates to NGOs, well, clearly because the governments have been incapacitated, the NGOs have moved in rather quickly to fill that void. And we've seen that and we've partnered with them and we're using them as effective partners in design and implementation of programs.

BAKER: In terms of maximizing the chances for successful post conflict peace-building, what are the most important lessons from recent experience.

COLETTA: Well, it's a tough question. There are some obvious ones for me. One is that you can't have development, you can't even have reconstruction without peace and security and particularly security. And I've come to appreciate that one of the areas that has to have immediate attention is some kind of a legitimate, credible policing function, whether that's done in the first instance by some international organizations, [Ecamog] in West Africa, support to police -- strengthening police in Haiti from the U.S. government, the Canadian government, I think was involved there. In Uganda it was the British government. And military reform. You have a, you know, a tremendous reform problem in a lot of these countries -- in Cambodia where the military is highly fragmented factions and in many instances is the cause of prolonged struggle. These things need somebody to deal with. I would call it the security sector.

The other thing that is an important piece to the security is justice. I think there has to be some attention paid to re-establishing, re-building the justice system in these countries. And people, if they don't have a sense of a place they can go to address their grievances or redress the situations that caused the conflict in the first place, then you can be assured that without the -- without justice and without security, the rest of the stuff will not have an environment, and enable the environment to move forward -- all of the physical reconstruction, all of the human capital development through education, basic services of health, water supply, etc. [That would be] non-starters, really.

BAKER: What about the notion -- I think a lot of people tend to think of development assistance as something that's brought in and imposed from the outside. How -- I'll go ahead and ask while it's ringing, but how important is it to get -- to engage civil society or the local population in carrying out these programs?

COLETTA: We have come down very strongly, particularly here in the post-conflict unit. We're pushing it very hard the importance, that is the importance of engaging local societies, civil society, revitalizing, restoring social capital is what we refer to this as, re-building the trust in divided communities, strengthening local organizations. As really the, probably apart from what I said earlier on security issues and on justice, maybe this is the third leg of the sine qua non of really getting to some sustainable peace. And that's for people to take some sense of ownership in the reconstruction process itself. And to achieve this, what we've done is we've focused on -- now in four different countries, we have pilot activities that are called slightly different things but they all revolve around the concept of community, reintegration, reconstruction, reconciliation. And they're placing funds in the hands of local communities, establishing community development committees with representatives of the local communities to actually prioritize needs, set up a mechanism for drawing down and allocating those funds to address those needs, and monitoring it. We're doing this in Rwanda. We're doing this in Cambodia. We're doing this in Colombia. And we're doing this in Angola. These are all conflict-ridden areas, but we're piloting these community-based reintegration and reconstruction programs -- highly participatory stuff.

BAKER: That's a long way from the kind of stereotypical notion of building a big dam.

COLETTA: It sure is. And, you know, in many ways I should hasten also to add that we're not -- we're not throwing the baby out with the bath water here. We're still in the business of trying to do physical reconstruction and provide the financing for that. We're still in the business of trying to get the macro-economics right so that the currency that people do have is worth something in the market place and so their prices are not distorted in favor of certain segments of the population, so there's some kind of tax base eventually to sustain any reconstruction that takes place. But we've just learned and we've concluded that the human element, the ownership and the participation element are key institutional aspects to sustaining all of this economic and physical reconstruction that we did earlier.

BAKER: I asked you earlier about the bank's role with the broader international development community. What about the post conflict unit's role. Is there -- do you see an opportunity for this unit to take a leadership role within the bank itself in seeking new directions in the way assistance is administered?

COLETTA: Well, I must say if you look at Bosnia, we -- as an example -- I think the very fact that the conditions in Bosnia necessitated all kinds of adjustments in our normal regulations and procedures, I would say that probably the greatest benefit in the long term here is going to be the post-conflict unit as a kind of instrument of bank transformation, of changing our own way of doing business, simply because of what we learn in these situations, and situations that press us to actually come up with new ways of doing business. And we find out at the end of the day, we probably should have been doing it this way all along in normal situations.

BAKER: And is there openness to that lesson institution wide?

COLETTA: I would think so. We had a presentation here -- I mean, we do a lot of -- a lot of the work here is actually on our own people, bringing our own colleagues into the orbit of change that's going on and the demands that are being made on the institution. We had a presentation on Bosnia the other day. We had people out in the hallway and we couldn't get a -- we had over a hundred people in a room that we had initially anticipated 60 people would show up, discussing these very kinds of things, you know, how did we do business differently. What's different about a war torn country like Bosnia than a normal country that we would do business in?

BAKER: It would appear from looking at the document that I had, the framework for World Bank involvement in post-conflict reconstruction, maps out a pretty broad agenda. If you could look down the road a few years -- four, five, six years -- can you cite, say, three areas that you would like to see the bank be particularly well known for doing well?

COLETTA: Well, certainly one comes immediately to mind is conflict analysis and conflict prevention. This is not -- shall I wait and start again?

BAKER: Yes. Let's start again.

COLETTA: I'll start up again.

Well, certainly one area where I think if I were to look down the road where I'd like to see the bank much more active is in the whole area of conflict analysis. And looking at development as a means of preventing conflict. And here if you look at the underlying causes of a lot of these conflicts which are, you know, essentially struggles over scarce resources which get translated into issues of identity and ethnicity, population pressures to those resources, the unequal distribution of access to those resources, these are all issues that -- of a -- that should be and are a concern to people dealing with economic and social development. So, I do think that's number one, that we really do need to do more in the whole area of conflict analysis and looking at our development interventions as ways of preempting conflict. This is not to say that -- I believe that conflict is a normal part of social and economic transformation, first of all. So, what we're really talking about is managing conflict, and managing diversity to get a constructive output rather than a violent, destructive output. There's a couple of others, I suppose, we could put on the table. I think we need to deal more with governance, the whole area of justice, justice reform and perhaps decentralization falls into that ambit. But let me keep that separate for the moment and just deal with justice, rule of law, the ability for people to believe that they do have access to redress their grievances. They do have voice in their societies. There's a lot we can do there.

And then I think the third area would be more decentralized, empowering type of development where we're promoting more popular participation and ownership of the development process by the people themselves.

BAKER: Tell me again what you mean by that?

COLETTA: Well, I think it's the example I gave earlier of where -- where, you know, rather than treat people as the objects of development assistance, they should be viewed as the owners and subjects of their own development. This is to say that rather than us going in as technical experts and proscribing what is needed, to actually engage populations and promote their engagement in a process of dialogue, of trying to identify their own needs, their own opportunities, their own resource gaps, and turning that into a form of demand, if you will on their own governments to be more responsive. This is really what I have in mind when I talk about popular participation. It's people organizing to make decisions about the allocation and use and transparency of resources to address the needs that emerge from those decisions, needs and priorities and so on.

BAKER: Change the tape.

COLETTA: Okay.

[END SIDE A, BEGIN SIDE B]

BAKER: Perhaps you could cite a few of the Uganda demobilization projects [inaudible] like one, but are there -- can you name the regions and programs that have been in that category?

COLETTA: Yeah. Oh, boy, I'm sorry about this.

BAKER: That's all right.

COLETTA: Let's just hold off and I'll start [inaudible].

BAKER: Okay. That's good to give you a minute to think about it.

COLETTA: Yeah. Well, I think -- let's start with Uganda. There's a country that when I first set foot in 1990, you couldn't venture out of your hotel room -- gunshots firing all evening long. They took our policy prescriptions and medicines and things still weren't turning around. And finally we got into the business of addressing some of these underlying issues of security and demobilization, demilitarization, decentralization, property rights which is one of the dimensions of governance I didn't mention, contract law -- the kinds of things that affect people's lives, and people's willingness to invest in their own lives, nonetheless foreign investment to come in. And Uganda in the last couple of years has had the highest growth rate in Africa. Now, I don't want to attribute economic GNP, GDP as the most critical indicator of development, but you can visibly see any place you go in that country that things have seriously changed and the image of the country has changed. People don't, you know, have a one to one correspondence when they hear Uganda to the atrocities and the era of Idi Amin. They really now think of a different Uganda, a Museveni Uganda, a leader in Africa. That's one place, and I think the demobilization program, the property rights program, the return properties to Asia, returning Asians were very critical to all of that. Some justice reform that we assisted the government with.

Mozambique, I think, is another place. I think in Mozambique, we played a very important role in supporting the reintegration program for returning refugees and for internally displaced persons. As you probably know, maybe up to one third of that country was displaced, living mostly outside of the country, in Malawi and other places, ex-combatant reintegration programs, training and employment schemes, highly successful generation of jobs through rural works and through small grants and small credit schemes. Bosnia -- Bosnia has in many ways, I think, been slightly different because there we've managed to get some of the macro-economic stuff right and -- but we're still struggling obviously with the incentives to get refugees to return. There's still tremendous fear, I think, in that country, but we've done a lot of work to set a kind of social safety net up for people who were affected by the war to have employment schemes of various kinds, to have micro-credit implemented through NGOs, to target our credit and housing assistance in ways that would promote communities returning in an undivided way, we hope -- people willing to live together and start anew. So these are three cases where I think we've done quite well. I mean, we're not out of the woods by any means, certainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina but -- or in West Bank Gaza. But we do see that we played an important role to stabilize the situation and to give people hope. And this is critical.

BAKER: Just one thing that occurred to me. We shot this whole interview with a "Danger, Land Mines" sign behind us and we haven't really touched on de-mining. Perhaps could you say how land mines inhibit development?

MR. : Could you just sit forward for this one?

BAKER: -- inhibit development and perhaps programs that the bank has to demining programs that you have.

COLETTA: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's become tremendously important when you think of all the land, for example, that is out of cultivation in a place like Cambodia or Angola simply for the fear of mines, not to mention the actual presence of mines as a Cambodian who runs the Cambodia Mine Action Center once said to me that the thought of a single mine is sufficient to keep hundreds of acre -- hectors of land out of production. So, one clear area is the agricultural sector. You need to clear the mines in order to free up the agricultural lands and get people to return to them. Second, is obviously the transport links. You know, unless people can get their products to market and if roads are mined, if ports are mined, etc., you know, you're not going to be able to have the free market movement of goods and services that stimulate economic development. Thirdly is the human dimension. I mean these societies are rift, Angola in particular, Cambodia as well with casualties of mines and mostly innocent civilians. And this just is not only a human tragedy, but it's a tremendous economic burden on a country who has to devote so much of its social welfare and health -- health costs to providing for disability. So, you know, on all three of those counts, land mines has become clearly a priority for us. We actually have new guidelines that the bank has passed, policy guidelines that now allow us to do work in this area. We are doing active lending in Croatia, in Bosnia, we're talking about some work in Azerbaljan, in Cambodia and Angola -- and in Mozambique. So, this is, I think, probably going to be a growth area actually, for the bank, and not one that we'd like to see as a growth area.

BAKER: Could you just summarize again, the World Bank's policy towards -- their new policy towards land mines, just a little shorter summary.

COLETTA: The substance of it?

BAKER: Yeah, and the approach to dealing with land mines.

COLETTA: Yeah. The Bank board just agreed to a new policy for the Bank's involvement in land mine action. And land mine action for us is not simply the removal of the mines, it's also mine victim assistance. It's also the prior even mapping and identification of mines. And even before that, or along with that the whole process of mine awareness and mine education. So we see it as a range of activities called mine action and we are providing assistance in several countries now -- Cambodia, Bosnia. We're planning to do something in Azerbaljan. We're also doing something now in Croatia. We probably will do something in Angola. There's a request on the board in Mozambique.

BAKER: My last question -- somewhere in something you wrote -- I think in "From Civil War to Civil Society," you --

COLETTA: Boy, you have done your homework. [laughter]

BAKER: -- you said -- or someone said, whoever wrote that under your hand, said most important, however, is a sense of humility.

COLETTA: Yeah.

BAKER: What was meant by that?

COLETTA: Among the Bank staff members.

BAKER: I guess among people dealing with post-conflict situations and administering programs. I got the sense it had to do with the fact that failure will occur despite the best plans, that every situation is daunting, but -- I don't know.

COLETTA: Yeah. I think one has to go in with a heavy -- well, with two things in mind. I think one is that you're in for the long haul, that there's going to be a slow process to really obtaining reconciliation and rebuilding trust, that has been severely eroded over the -- so, one has to as a part of that kind of have a what I would call a Ho Chi Min outlook, perspective -- the long haul, and that incremental successes are going to be very important. And within that framework, I think one really does have to have a sense of humility that we're not out there with any silver bullet, that this institution is not going to remake a country overnight, and that ultimately, it's going to be the people themselves that have to pull the country up and put it back together. We can only try and help. We can facilitate. We can try and bring resources and some expertise together, but we really have to -- have to keep this sense of perspective and humility in mind when we do it.

BAKER: Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

COLETTA: We're at the beginning of a long -- a long journey and probably one of the most important things that I've said that you've asked me about is what impact this whole post-conflict unit is having on the Bank itself and could have on the Bank itself. And I guess I would just like to accent that, that in some ways, this unit you might view as a kind of a -- a conundrum, a cauldron of bureaucratic guerrillas who are set out to make a difference in these countries that are war torn but in the same process or at the same time will probably end up having quite a role to play in changing the way the Bank works worldwide not just in war torn countries. So this is a very important dimension to our work is the institutional reform itself within the bank. And I hope we can contribute to that and I think Wolfensen is -- we've got the right person with the right vision at the top and hopefully we can help make that happen. That's it.

BAKER: Mr. Coletta, thank you very much.

MR. : Glenn, the --

BAKER: Maybe this last bit. But I mean, it's interesting to hear [inaudible] detail specifics. If I'm able to get some footage about the Uganda thing, I may do a little bit about that.

MR. : [inaudible]

COLETTA: Okay.

BAKER: Just go on telling me as you're telling me about --

COLETTA: Yeah.

BAKER: [Ecabog] in Sierra Leone has taken -- obviously saw your book, but you invented it from the ground up is what I --

COLETTA: Yeah.

BAKER: -- the Uganda.

COLETTA: Yeah. Essentially the Uganda demobilization [renegotiation] package was home grown. You know, we went out there only with a set of questions. We had no prescription. We'd never done anything like this before. And what we decided was we had to ask some basic questions and the first thing we needed to know were what were the needs of these -- what was the profile of these beneficiaries, these soldiers to be demobilized? So we actually did a kind of a needs assessment. We trained lieutenants and -- I guess it was lieutenant rank or level to go out and conduct surveys. We got the data and we found things that were amazing that helped, that really had an impact on the program. We found that 70 percent of these soldiers wanted to go back to the land. We then turned around and did a study of arable land availability because we knew exactly where they wanted to go, which districts would have the most intense number of returnees. We overlaid the arable land, available land map survey which happened to have been done by an agricultural mission a couple years previously with the impending avalanche of soldiers requesting land in these areas. We overlaid the two and we could immediately identify the two or three districts that -- that were going to be a problem to address the -- what these soldiers would like which was a piece of land. We did a -- we developed this opportunity structure survey which looked at the various what I would call markets, you know, in a very quick snap shot -- what's the training market look like? What's the credit market look like? What's the land market look like? What is -- what does -- what do any social services look like in these communities? What does the job market look like? And then pulling together the needs that we've identified through this profile, the needs and characteristics and aspirations is what we really focuses on -- pulling that together with the opportunities for the various markets if you will and then looking at institutional mechanisms and the capacity to implement, to draw these two together needs and supply and demand if you will. We were really able to create a really relevant program there.

BAKER: Sounds like it may have been an advantage to go in with a blank slate, without having any [inaudible] --

COLETTA: Well, I would definitely -- I would definitely think so. I mean, in this -- and that's one -- one of the parts of what I maybe meant by humility. That it's better to sort of try and leave all of your predisposed, preconceived notions at the door, you know, sort of check your ego at the door kind of thing and come in with a very fresh -- I don't know anything about this place. I don't know how it works. Now, let's start out finding, you know, what's going on here. And what are the needs, what are the opportunities and how can we make something good happen for these people? And that's a difficult thing to do, I mean, actually in training development work because it's one of the things that I think is incredibly important is how do you get a person to check their pre -- their assumptions at the door. I mean, for me, it's best not to make any assumptions no matter how experienced and skilled you are because every situation has its own slightly different nuances and if you can refrain from making assumptions you [inaudible] -- and ask the questions that seem ridiculously obvious, but in the end prove to be not so -- not what you expected for an answer -- this is the way to approach this kind of area. So I -- my own colleagues when we go out, always reminding them that be humble. Don't think you have the answers before you get on the ground. You're opening yourself up to listening to people, and this is important.

BAKER: I know you have to go --

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