Government of Timor-Leste

On 11 March 2013 the Minister of Social Solidarity, Isabel Amaral Guterres, accompanied by the General-Director and the General-Coordinator, Eugénio João Amado de Maria Soares, met with the representative of the World Bank, Junko Onishi, a specialist on social protection, at the building of the Ministry of Social Solidarity, Caicoli, Dili, with the purpose of consolidating the cooperation ties in the framework of the Social Protection Administration Project (SPAP).

The objective of the meeting was to strengthen the cooperation ties within PAPS and exchange ideas on the establishment of the social protection project through the online integrated database system.

Eugénio João Amado de Maria Soares, SPAP General-Coordinator, stated that “the cooperation between the Ministry of Social Solidarity and the World Bank represents a positive step; it provides support to two functionaries of the Ministry by training them on the technical area of Information Technology for a period of three months in Indonesia”.

The General-Coordinator also informed that “the functionaries of the Information Technology area of the Ministry of Social Solidarity are now ready to implement the database, thereby facilitating the concertation of all data existing in the Ministry for the benefit of the population and all the beneficiaries, making them understand their rights insofar as the allowances for the elderly are concerned”.

Eugénio Soares also stressed that the team of the Ministry of Social Solidarity, together with the World Bank, has conducted an inspection to the Ministry’s district centres (Oe-Cusse, Same, Manatuto, Maliana and Baucau), having identified some problems such as, for example, insufficiency of electricity to install the data entry machine. The installation of this machine enables the registration of information data on the district, notably as regards three programmes: the Elderly and the Disabled Programme, the Mum’s Pocket Welfare Programme, and the Natural Disasters Programme.