The Minister of Finance Emília Pires held a press conference on TLDPM with the Civil Society Organizations on 5 July 2011 at the Knowledge Center Room, Ministry of Finance. The event was fully attended by local and international CSOs representatives demonstrating a growing sense of collaboration between government and civil society for the sake of the nation building.

Emília Pires explained that unlike the previous TLDPM meetings, the upcoming TLDPM 11-13 July will show specific changes including the launching of the Strategic Development Plan (SDP) by Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão on the second day 12 July and the 5 parallel round tables discussing the thematic areas: 1) Petroleum sector 2) Finance, Banking and Investment, 3) Agriculture and Rural Development, 4) Infrastructure and 5) Social Capital.

Minister of Finance further said that the TLDPM Meeting is expected to answer crucial questions including: what needs to be done to help the government towards people wellbeing; how to effectively harmonize and integrate the external assistance in order to support the TL development process; what kind of mechanism to be applied to effectively manage the development programs; what kind of commitment from the development partners and the government in order to ensure the development programs are more effectively managed, and how to increase domestic production capacity in order to reduce dependency on the import volume.

Minister Pires also informed the CSOs that TL is now leading international dialogues since April 2010 including the recent event of Monrovia g7+ and International dialogue on 12-14 June and 15-16 June 2011 respectively, which successfully resulted in the Monrovia Road Map that will be presented in Busan (South Korea) High Level Forum in December 2011.

On top of all, Minister Pires underlined the eagerness of Timorese dream of one day in future to achieve the level of being one of the Asian Miracles like the previous Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and South Korea. To get there, several measures are key to success, in particular mentality change in conjunction with capacity building, and rule of law.

During the conference the CSOs representatives asked several questions: the methodology of the TLDPM; why the security sector was not included in the round table discussions; the language used in the forum and why not put more emphasis on private sector?

The Minister suggested the CSOs to organize themselves and encouraged a woman to be part of, and or chairing one of round table discussions.