Turkey - Social Risk Mitigation Project

Report No. PID10515 Project Name Turkey-Social Risk Mitigation Project (@) Region Europe and Central Asia Region Sector Primary Education; Primary Health; Including Reproductive Health; Chi; Social Assistance Project ID TRPE74408 Borrower(s) GOVERNMENT OF TURKEY Implementing Agency Address SOCIAL SOLIDARITY FUND (SYDTF) Address: Karanfil Sokak No. 67, Bakanliklar, Ankara, Turkey Contact Person: Yadigar Gokalp, Project Coordinator Tel: 0-312-424 0701 Fax: 0-312-424 0704 Email: yadigar@mailcity.com SOCIAL SERVICES AND CHILD PROTECTION ORGANIZATION (SHCEK) Address: Anafartalar Caddesi No. 70, Ulus, Ankara, Turkey Contact Person: Mehmet Ozdal, Director General Tel: 0-312-310 3210 Fax: 0-312-312 2880 Email: webmail@dediknet.com STATE INSTITUTE OF STATISTICS (DIE) Address: Necatibey Caddesi No. 14, Sihhiye, Ankara, Turkey Contact Person: Nurgul Ogut, Vice President Tel: 0-312-425 2104 Fax: 0-312-417 4225 Email: nurgul ogut@die.gov.tr Environment Category F Date PID Prepared July 18, 2001 Projected Appraisal Date July 23, 2001 Projected Board Date September 11, 2001 1. Country and Sector Background Social and Poverty Impact of the Crisis The social impact of the crisis is already being felt as lay-offs, rising prices, and negative economic growth reduce household incomes, and increase the risk of poverty on the poor. The landless poor in rural areas have been affected by a decline in construction and other informal job opportunities, a problem that has also severely affected the urban poor also. Meanwhile the poor with land are beset by increased input costs due to inflation. A full social assessment for the SRMP has been completed. The main findings are:Qualitative evidence on withdrawal of children from school. Field visits were  undertaken to Eastern Anatolia, Southern Anatolia, Central Anatolia, Istanbul slums, Ankara slums and the Black Sea region. When asked in the absence of officials (and sometimes even in the presence of officials although it is illegal in Turkey to keep a child from school), the poor have replied that because of the crisis they are not going to be able to send their children to school in September, illegal or not. So there is an imminent danger of the destruction of human capital. Additionally, Ministry of Health staff in Ankara and the field report underutilization of preventative care by poor families.Out-of-pocket school expenditures are larger than anticipated. In Turkey, compulsory education through grade 8 is free of charge. However, at least in Istanbul, some public schools required registration fees in school year 2000-2001 of TL 20 million (nearly US $30 at the December 2000 exchange rate). Rural families repeatedly stressed the cost of appropriate clothing for children, particularly shoes and winter coats, and some stated that they had been forced to keep their children at home for lack of clothing.Child labor as a coping device among the poorest families. The poorest families are forced to mobilize all possible members as income earners to contribute to family income, even if they are children. In the Duragan area of Sinop province, families send boys as young as 9 to work for low wages in agriculture. In the major cities, children work in the informal sector, and certain cities (including Istanbul, Gazantiep, Diyabikar) have signficant groups of street childrenChanged consumption patterns of food. As a coping strategy to the crisis, many poor families reported drastic changes in their consumption pattern of food, cutting back sharply on meat, fresh fruits, vegetables, and tea. The worse cases reported that they were subsiding almost exclusively on bread.Profile of extreme poverty. Families with many children, particularly with many female children are at especial risk of extreme poverty, particularly in rural areas and in families where the main breadwinner (the husband) is disabled, dead, or absent for military service. Other groups at risk are single elderly living alone with no social insurance and recent migrants to urban slum areas. In March 2001, a simulation of the impact of the crisis on the welfare distribution was undertaken, using household data from 1994, to identify the characteristics of the most vulnerable households. This simulation suggested five patterns of likely increased poverty as a result of the February 2001 financial crisis: (i) families with many children (widows with many children are particularly vulnerable and extended families with many children, as well as single-parent families, seem to be the most affected in terms of high rates and high increases in food poverty; (ii) an increase in unemployment disproportionately affect families with many children; (iii) those with moderate levels of education seem more likely to become vulnerable--but still above the food poverty line--while the least educated are those most likely to become food poor; and (iv) the urban population seems more at risk (vulnerable) of slipping into food poverty as they have no access to small food plots to complement meagre cash incomes. Families with reduced income have responded to the crisis by reducing consumption, shifting to lower cost and quality food, postponing purchases of durables, and more worrying, proposing to keep their children back from school due to the out of pocket expenses such as uniform, shoes and stationery. These Government is responding to this situation with a package of structural reforms designed to help pull the economy out of recession and restore growth as soon as possible, which is the key to minimizing job loss, and the social and poverty impact of the crisis. Restored confidence in the - 2 -  financial sector will help reverse the on-going credit crunch and generate new resources for economic recovery and job creation. The public sector reforms will help ensure the quality of the fiscal adjustment and improve overall efficiency of social service delivery. Better public expenditure management will increase the availability of resources for social expenditures. Actions to upgrade the operational performance of line ministries and agencies, including increased emphasis on policy formulation and a progressive shift to performance budgeting, will help ensure that these additional resources are used effectively to fight poverty and vulnerability. Action under the program to improve public governance and tackle corruption are likely to benefit the poor disproportionately as shown in numerous international studies. Structural reform of the financial and public sectors is also crucial to avoid future crisis which would likely be devastating for the poor. Protecting Social Expenditures The Government is strengthening Turkey's social protection programs (including through the support of the SRMP) and is committed to protecting social spending under the Programmatic Financial and Public Sector Adjustment Loan (PFPSAL) program. Protecting expenditure on health, education and social protection from the impact of the crises is a key social objective. Otherwise, Turkey's human capital will suffer and the burden of adjustment will fall on vulnerable groups. A supplementary budget for 2001 was approved by Parliament in June which is consistent with the Government's macroeconomic objectives and also ensures adequate expenditure envelopes for health, education and social protection. The budget maintains aggregate spending on education slightly above the average levels of 1998-2000 (as a share of GNP) and programs a significant increase in expenditure on social protection relative to 2000, resulting in part from the launch of the Direct Income Support (DIS) program for farmers. The preliminary outcome for spending on health, education and social protection under the 2001 budget will be monitored in October. Benchmarks for public spending on health, education and social protection have been set at a level above the averages for the 1998-2000 period, reflecting the Government's policy decision to ensure adequate expenditure on social priorities. Strengthening the social safety-net. Social Insurance. The Government is working to improve the social safety-net, and especially to reform the social security system. The reforms are necessary because the system is insolvent and the level of benefits is not sustainable. The first phase of social security reform consists of modifications to the public pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system to stem operating losses, including raising the retirement age for new entrants. The second phase of the social security reform strategy, planned for 2001, focuses on strengthening the organizational underpinnings of the system, extending its coverage, separating the pension system from associated health insurance and unemployment schemes, and eliminating accumulated arrears. The third phase is to introduce a framework for supplementary individual pension schemes. These reforms will bring forward a more targeted and sustainable social security system for old-age, but will only insure against one kind of risk - that of inadequate savings in old-age. The existing severance payment system which covers both public and private enterprises continues to operate and is being strengthened by the Bank-financed Privatization Social Support Project. The unemployment insurance program, introduced as part of the reform of the public pension system in August 1999, will begin to make payments to the enrolled unemployed in early 2002 and thus is not addressed by the SRMP. The Government is moving quickly to expand - 3-  targeted social assistance to those groups most affected by the crisis. This support will include programs to protect vulnerable families (such as assistance with food, medicine and social services) supported directly by the SRMP. Limitations of Social Insurance. Social insurance (pensions and disability) are tied to an individual having a job in the formal sector. With the exception of the Bag Kur social insurance plan for the self-employed, the whole social security system is linked to holding a formal job (including the newly-introduced unemployment insurance). Such a system runs the distinct risk of excluding those without a connection to the formal labor market. In the 1994 Living Standards Assessment, it was demonstrated that households headed by seasonal or casual workers (workers without a labor contract) were at high risk of poverty and economic vulnerability, and that approximately one out of four workers in Turkey are casual employees. Turkey's social protection system lacks a benefit that would be targeted to these vulnerable groups. A comprehensive social safety-net helps to insure against the risks of unemployment and poverty. Unfortunately, there are several large gaps in the social safety-net in Turkey. Turkey has only recently adopted unemployment benefits, but due to the period of required contributions, people will not be able to draw unemployment benefits until 2002. So, those who become jobless as a result of the economic crisis or reforms will not have unemployment insurance to support them while they search for other jobs. Social assistance is not comprehensive in Turkey but rather ad hoc, patchy, limited and underfunded. Turkey's existing Social Assistance is quite limited. Turkey does not have a poverty benefit--a cash transfer that is targeted to the vulnerable--which could be used to help those negatively affected by the reform. Social assistance in Turkey is limited to ad hoc assistance in kind channeled through the 933 SYDTVs, and limited programs for the elderly and disabled under Law 2022, as well as institutional care for children and the elderly administered by SHCEK. Turkey has no other cash transfers that could help the vulnerable, unlike many neighboring countries of Western and Eastern Europe, which have universal child allowances. The 1994 Living Standards Assessment for Turkey found that the presence of children in a household does increase the risk of poverty substantially. Children under 10 years old have the highest poverty risk among all age groups. Using the Social Safety-net to Protect Human Capital Turkey's social indicators do not compare favorably with other middle income countries. In particular, infant and maternal mortality in Turkey is quite high for a middle-income country and female literacy is noticeably lower than the comparator countries (except for Tunisia). Life expectancy at birth is equal to Tunisia and lower than the other countries. These facts point out the importance of interventions in health and education, especially education of women. The Bank has been working in partnership with Turkey on the supply side of these interventions, with several projects in education (including basic education) and health. However, to date, there have been limited efforts on the demand side, mostly in the form of public information campaigns, which have not had much effect on these social indicators. The SRMP will help to fill this gap on the demand side by creating an incentive for poor households to keep their children in school and monitored by the health system--the conditional cash transfers. CCT are an important tool in the country's arsenal for improving these social indicators, since better education (particularly female education) has been linked to improved health indicators for mothers and children and higher household income. - 4 -  2. Objectives The development objective of the Social Risk Mitigation Project (SRMP), is to contribute to poverty reduction in Turkey in both the short and long-term: (i) providing immediate income support to the poorest affected by the crisis (social risk mitigation); (ii) building up the capacity of state institutions providing services and social assistance to the poor (social risk management); (iii) implementing a basic social assistance system (Conditional Cash Transfers - CCT) targeted to the poorest 8 percent of the population conditional on improved use of basic health and education services (social risk mitigation and prevention); and (iv) increasing the income generating and employment opportunities of the poor (social risk prevention).Turkey is requesting the support of the World Bank in the form of a hybrid loan of US $500 million for the SRMP to assist in the implementation of these measures. The SRMP will consist of two elements: (i) rapid response, US$ 100 million to provide immediate support to the poorest and most vulnerable groups affected by the crisis - thereby mitigating immediate social risks; and (ii) investment, US$ 400 million to strengthen programs for social risk mitigation, prevention and management over the medium to long-term. A key goal of the SRMP is to create a social assistance system in Turkey that is targeted to the poorest, and which will provide not only a "safety-net" for the poor, but also a "trampoline" to help the poor escape poverty - a system which not only mitigates social risk, but also helps to prevent and manage it. The SRMP will also undergird the Government's overall economic reform program through mitigating social costs for the poorest. 3. Rationale for Bank's Involvement The February 2001 crisis has made the Government more aware both of the need to mitigate the immediate negative impacts on the poor, and also to address long-term issues of poverty and social exclusion. The Bank is able to contribute to both of these needs in a major way. In terms of the rapid response to the crisis, the Bank is able to provide additional financial resources and guidance on the key programs which would help mitigate the negative impacts of the crisis on the poor (support to poor families in basic education, health, heating and food consumption as well as strengthening the legal framework for the social safety-net). Over the longer-term, the Bank is: (i) providing guidance on improvements in government structures to help the poor (SYDTF, SYDTVs, SHCEK and DIE) including a stronger voice for the poor themselves; (ii) building up the institutional capacity of these same institutions, including the introduction of regular HIES to monitor poverty; (iii) supporting the introduction of an affordable, highly targeted social safety-net (the CCT) which will lead to improved health and education outcomes for the poor, through both policy advice and finance; and (iv) improving the quality of income generating and employability training activities under the Local Initiatives component by bringing in best practice from social funds globally, improving procedures and criteria, including the essential elements of the Government's economic reform program. 4. Description The SRMP has four strongly complementary components:Rapid Response (US$ 100.0 million, of which Bank US$100.0 million): The SRMP would support key programs of the SYDTF targeted to the poorest households in a single disbursement upon loan effectiveness, inter alia: (i) school attendance packs (uniforms, shoes, clothes, stationery, textbooks and back-pack); - 5 -  (ii) pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for "green-card" holders; and (iii) expansion of existing social assistance programs (including family food and heating support) to meet the increased real needs generated by the crisis. Board presentation requires Government compliance with certain highlighted in the next section of the PAD, and signature of the Letter of Development Policy (LDP) on social assistance and poverty reduction.Institutional Development (US$ 36.54 million, of which Bank US$ 31.90 million): The SRMP would strengthen the institutional capacity of key government agencies to improve the coverage and targeting of the social safety-net for the poor. Key elements include strengthening (i) policy research, M&E capacities; (ii) MIS & IT development; (iii) staff development and training; and (iv) public information campaigns. This would include the provision of TA, training, computer and other equipment for the MIS to the SYDTF, SYDTVs, SHCEK and the DIE.CCT (US$ 480.00 million, of which Bank US$ 260.0 million): The SRMP would finance the introduction through the SYDTF/SYDTVs of an expanded social safety-net targeted to the poorest 8 percent of families linked to certain positive behavioral changes such as keeping children in school and ensuring children receive adequate immunization coverage in a timely manner, basic health care and nutrition (including resolving micro-nutrient deficiencies). This would require the introduction of an improved and systematic targeting system using "points" for household characteristics linked to poverty. The CCT is a highly targeted social assistance transfer to families with children, requiring positive family behavioral change with respect to health and education.Local Initiatives (US$ 127.34 million, of which Bank US$ 103.10 million): The SRMP would strengthen and finance key programs of the SYDTF/SYDTVs as proposed by Provinces, Districts, and local community demand, designed to provide enhanced sustainable employment opportunities for the poor, thereby reducing poverty. Such programs are: (i) income-generating sub-projects (which will receive improved technical assessment and M&E under the SRMP); (ii) employability training (including adult literacy - especially for women), technical and life skills training for unemployed youth - including how to get a job, start a small business); (iii) expansion of the network of SHCEK community centers as the basis for increased outreach of community social services; and (iv) temporary community employment which will support workfare activities. 5. Financing Total ( US$m) BORROWER 248.00 IBRD 500.00 Total Project Cost 748.00 6. Implementation The SRMP would be managed by the SYDTF which has created a small project coordination unit (PCU) with satisfactory staff to perform the following functions: project management, procurement, financial management & disbursement, MIS, monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Collaboration protocols will be signed with other involved parties such as SHCEK, DIE, Ministry of National Education (MEB), and Ministry of Health (SB) prior to Board.The SYDTF is an extra-budgetary fund established by Law No. 3294 dated May 29, 1986. The SYDTF is administered by a Committee comprising Undersecretary of Prime Ministry, Undersecretary of Ministry of Interiors, Undersecretary of Ministry of Health, the General Directorate of - 6-  Foundations and the General Director of the SHCEK, under the chairmanship of a State Minister appointed by the Prime Minister. All of the decisions made at the Committee meetings enter into effect after approval and ratification by the Prime Minister. The SYDTF does not have its own administrative capacity and most of its staff members are seconded and paid from ministries or other agencies. The SYDTF is subject to government regulations on accounting (Uniform Code of Accounts) and record-keeping; however, the Fund is not required to produce financial statements, given its nature of extra-budgetary fund and tax-exemption status. The SYDTF is subject to annual audits by the Prime Ministry Supreme Audit Board.The SYDTF's existing accounting unit is not prepared and adequately staffed to cope with the increased workload originated by the project and the existing financial management system is inadequate to support project accounting/reporting functions (following government accounting classifications and conventions) and not supported by the needed internal controls; hence the need (among other fiduciary areas, where adequate resources and skills are lacking) for the establishment of a Project Coordination Unit through which specialized information systems and adequate professional expertise will be made available to the SYDTF. The strategic governance of the project will reside with the Advisory Board, composed of all stakeholders and chaired by the State Minister responsible for the SYDTF. The Board will be in charge of policy making and will be the project's decisional body. Among others, the Advisory Board will approve project reporting as well as the annual budget/work plan. The PCU, physically located within the SYDTF, will be in charge of project management, administration and concrete implementation, functioning as service-provider to the various implementing agencies. The PCU will work as a specialized organizational unit of the SYDTF, staffed with staff from the Fund (counterpart members) and local consultants for the activities where the SYDTF lacks, at present, experience: both fiduciary (disbursement, procurement, project accounting and reporting) and pertinent to SYDTF's core functions (for instance targeting, M&E and public information). The PCU team will involve representatives from the SHCEK and the DIE (to ease communication and facilitate coordination between the SYDTF and the two agencies) and will comprise a procurement person, an accountant, a disbursement person, an information technology expert, a monitoring and evaluation expert, a reporting and communication expert and two support staff. All PCU team members, including the consultants, will be appointed full time by project effectiveness. Job descriptions for the local consultants, to be hired for the life of the project and who will be preferably experienced in Bank-financed projects, were reviewed and approved by the Bank. It is expected that the SYDTF will improve its capacity by the support of these qualified professional individual consultants and that a financial management system satisfactory to the Bank will be maintained and strengthened by the Fund throughout project implementation. All fiduciary functions (disbursement, procurement, accounting and reporting) will be centralized at the PCU level. To that extent, the PCU must be not only appropriately resourced, but the PCU team members will need appropriate training in project management and administration. The SYDTF managed efficiently and effectively the emergency response to the August 1999 earthquake, proving itself as the most suitable vehicle to administer assistance transfers in a fast and sufficiently controlled way. However, it did not perform project management and administration functions for which, at present, there is no capacity in place. Furthermore, the SYDTF lacks written - 7 -  policies and procedures governing its functions and regulating its relations with the SYDTVs.The SYDTVs are separate autonomous legal entities established at the provincial/sub-provincial level, managed by their own local Committee (which is headed by the Governor at the provincial level and by his/her homologous at the sub-provincial level), enjoying relative latitude in decision-making and (given their legal status) exercising clear independence in carrying out their activities. For effective coordination and monitoring by the SYDTF on the activities carried out by the SYDTVs under the umbrella of the SRMP the parts will need to enter a Framework Protocol, spelling out respective roles and responsibilities and empowering the SYDTF with some sort of authority to implement specific actions in case of less than satisfactory participation or performance by the SYDTVs. To that extent, the introduction of standardized procedures and reporting formats will be needed, which will be one of the outcomes of the establishment of a common, unified financial and management information system (financed under the Institutional Development component of the project). In that sense, what proved to be an extremely successful response and spontaneous mobilization under the earthquake emergency needs, under the Social Risk Mitigation Project needs to be systematized and documented, in order to become an efficient, sustainable and transparent social safety net and an effective system of social services and assistance catering to the very needy people. In consideration of the project preparation tight time line and the reasonable amount of time (estimated in two to three months from appraisal) that the establishment of a satisfactory financial management system, adequate to support project implementation, will take - including human resources, software, hardware, policies and procedures documented in the Operational and Financial Management Manual - the positive re-assessment by the Bank of the accomplishments in this area will necessarily have to be regarded as a condition of disbursement for the non-adjustment portion of the Loan. 7. Sustainability This hybrid operation consists of two elements, the Rapid Response element which is by definition not intended to be sustainable, and the other element, the investment element, which by definition needs to be sustainable. The investment element includes three components, all of which are sustainable in the medium-term: Institutional Development, CCT, and Local Initiatives. For the Rapid Response component, the intention is to assist the Government with its immediate efforts to relieve the effects of the financial crisis on the most vulnerable--notably families with children, who were found to be the most vulnerable to the negative impact of the crisis. A special focus of the rapid response component is to assist children in poor families to partially offset the expenses associated with the return to school in September 2001. Other groups that would be assisted in this component are the poor holding health "green cards" to purchase pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, and those worst-affected by the crisis with assistance in kind and in cash. As a crisis intervention, these activities are by their nature one-off and do not require being sustained over the medium-term. However, the LDP commits the Treasury to transfer the SYDTF revenues to SYDTF on a regular and timely basis in future, thereby insuring its financial sustainability. On CCT, the Bank will provide the majority of financing of these transfers under the CCT component of the investment portion of the SRMP for its first three years. However, the Government will also - 8 -  contribute counterpart funding to these transfers, probably on an increasing basis. Initially, the CCT will be tightly targeted to the bottom 8 percent of the population by using a scoring formula, so overall costs will be contained. Sustainability of expenditures on CCT will be greatly facilitated by the use of the scoring formula, which would enable the Government to contract or expand CCT as economic conditions and budgetary resources permit. As part of the institutional strengthening component, evaluation and monitoring capacity will be developed in the SYDTF and other institutions so that a comprehensive evaluation of CCT can be undertaken during the SRMP. If CCT are as successful in Turkey as they have proved to be in Mexico and Colombia, it is possible that the Government could continue CCT beyond the life on the SRMP as an important contributor to the social safety net in Turkey. Owing to the flexible nature of the targeting mechanism, the Government could rapidly scale CCT up or down, depending on need and availability of budgetary resources. In the event that the Government decides not to sustain CCT beyond the life of the SRMP, the exit strategy would be for the Government to rely on other SYDTF activities such as workfare (envisioned under the Local Initiatives component) or other social assistance in kind, relying on the institutional strengthening of the SYDTF and SYDTV created under the SRMP. Institutional Development by its nature is sustainable, since the goal of it is to create capacity in Turkish institutions to facilitate reforms of the social safety-net and to become more efficient and effective in so doing. By investing now in MIS technology and setting up a targeting mechanism and scoring formula, the institutional strengthening efforts will lead to improved efficiency and lower operating costs, thus demonstrating sustainability. The Local Initiatives component is an expansion of the existing SYDTF programs, including income-generating and micro-credit programs, which cover their own costs and so are sustainable. Other local initiative activities include investments in human capital, such as literacy, which have an economic pay-off and positive externalities for Turkey. 8. Lessons learned from past operations in the country/sector The SRMP draws extensively upon the experience obtained through the implementation of the Bank's Turkish portfolio (Turkey) as well as World Bank operations responding to crisis in Indonesia, Colombia, and Ecuador (global). The design has been based upon the lessons learnt and experience gained from and other projects in Turkey, as well as social protection projects more widely (global). It is totally consistent with the ECA and Bank-wide Social Protection Strategy (strategy). The main lessons learnt (with source in parentheses) incorporated into the SRMP are summarized below:Comprehensive social mitigation approach: There are great synergies to be obtained by linking social protection with the health and education sectors as part of an overall social mitigation strategy (strategy). The SRMP explicitly links social assistance provision with health and education under the CCT, thereby developing important synergies and strengthening demand for basic health and education services by the poor.Policy implementation is as important as design: Even the best policy design can be undone by poor implementation (Turkey, global). The SRMP combines TA for policy design, together with the strengthening of M&E and resources for program implementation in a coherent and integrated manner. Strong national ownership: Projects will only be implemented effectively if there is strong national ownership (Turkey, global). The project components build exactly on the strengths - 9-  of the SYDTF, SYDTVs, SHCEK and DIE, and have their strongest endorsement. Provincial and District administrations and NGOs are also highly supportive.Involve stakeholders: Stakeholders views and inputs must be incorporated constantly into the project design if it is to respond to the real needs of the proposed beneficiaries (global, Turkey). The project includes a number of beneficiary assessment to monitor stakeholders interests and perceptions. Communities will be able to make sub-project proposals under the Local Initiatives component. All stakeholders are represented on the SRMP Advisory Board.Keep projects simple: The most common cause of project failure is complexity (global). Great attention is being given during preparation to keep the SRMP as simple as possible (within the context of inherently complex activities involving many stakeholders), reviewing each sub-component carefully, and building upon and improving what already exists whenever possible, rather than creating new programs. The only exception in the creation of the CCT - however this builds upon the existing ad hoc social assistance system of the SYDTF and SYDTVs.Centrality of M&E: M&E of social protection programs and projects has been inadequate (global, strategy) in many lending operations within social protection globally and in Turkey. Institutionalizing M&E across the entire range of the activities of the SYDTF, SYDTVs and SHCEK is central to, and one of the areas of real value-added, of the SRMP for Turkey.Coordinated informatics: Informatics systems must be able to communicate with one another with a user-friendly interface and should only be introduced after existing manual informations systems and processes have been streamlined (global, Turkey). Special attention is being given to ensure that the informatics systems of the SYDTF, SYDTVs and SHCEK will all inter-connect effectively, and will have a user-friendly interface. 9. Program of Targeted Intervention (PTI) Y 10. Environment Aspects (including any public consultation) Issues : There are no significant environmental issues. 11. Contact Point: Task Manager John A. Innes The World Bank 1818 H Street, NW Washington D.C. 20433 Telephone: (202) 473-5826 Fax: (202) 477-33-87 12. For information on other project related documents contact: The InfoShop The World Bank 1818 H Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20433 Telephone: (202) 458-5454 Fax: (202) 522-1500 Web: http:// www.worldbank.org/infoshop Note: This is information on an evolving project. Certain components may not be necessarily included in the final project. - 10 -