A/HRC/42/37/Add.2 68. Primary-school children who struggle to understand their teachers become disengaged, which results in high dropout rates, putting them at a disadvantage in continuing their education. In practice, this has impacted Timorese children whose mother tongue is a local language other than Tetum. 69. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the earnest efforts of the Government to assess its educational policy. Since 2012, the Ministry of Education has been piloting a mothertongue education programme in 10 primary schools in three different regions. It aims to introduce children to linguistic and numeric skills in their mother tongue and to support their transition to learning the official Timorese languages later on. Evaluations have indicated that the pilot programme has had a positive impact on school attendance, educational performance and the subsequent acquisition of Timor-Leste’s official languages.30 70. The Strategic Development Plan 2011–2030 stipulates that “local languages will be employed as languages of teaching and learning in the first years of basic education, providing a smooth transition to the acquisition of Timor-Leste’s official languages, in accordance with the recommendations of the ‘Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Policy for Timor-Leste’”.31 The National Policy for Inclusive Education adopted in 2017 also refers to the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Policy. 32 71. The Special Rapporteur regrets that despite the positive results from the assessments of the mother-tongue programme showing remarkable improvement in the performance of schoolchildren, to date the Government has not implemented the programme beyond the pilot schools that were included in the project. The Special Rapporteur calls on the Government to expand and implement the use of mother-tongue education in schools throughout the country and provide the necessary resources, trainings and materials for this. F. Development, poverty, the rights to food and health 72. In 2018 Timor-Leste ranked 132nd out of 189 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index.33 Timor-Leste has the highest rate of chronic malnutrition in SouthEast Asia and one of the highest in the world. Statistics indicate that nearly half of all children under 5 years of age suffer from chronic malnutrition and about 36 per cent of the population is chronically food insecure. 73. While there is a policy framework to address the incidence of chronic malnutrition, including the Zero Hunger National Action Plan 2015–2025, the National Nutrition Strategy 2014–2019 and the Food and Nutrition Security Policy of 2017, the State budget allocations for agriculture and health are reportedly only 2 and 5 per cent, respectively, for 2019. The Special Rapporteur recommends that additional government resources be assigned to implement, coordinate, monitor and evaluate the measures taken to reduce malnutrition. Multisectoral interventions in agriculture, health, education, water and sanitation should be supported. 74. Although the majority of the population works in the agricultural sector, domestic food production is insufficient and the country is highly dependent on the importation of food products, notably rice. The Special Rapporteur was informed about existing initiatives to use local indigenous crops such as cassava and sweet potato and she urges the Government to focus on increasing their production, notably with a view to reducing the incidence of malnutrition. She was also told about the Bolsa da Mãe programme which enables poor female-headed households to receive cash benefits on the condition that 30 31 32 33 S. Walter, “The Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (EMBLI) pilot program endline assessment: Timor-Leste”, 2016; and Jo Caffery and others, “The Timor-Leste Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education pilot project: a strategic evaluation”, 2014. Timor-Leste Strategic Development Plan 2011–2030, p. 16. National Policy for Inclusive Education 2017, objective 4, p. 28. See http://hdr.undp.org/en/2018-update. 13