Zoellick met finance ministers from Liberia, Togo, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast on Tuesday during a brief visit to Liberia, the second stop on a tour of African countries.

The World Bank chief, who has already visited Mauritania this week, will also travel to Ethiopia -- where he will attend the African Union summit -- and Mozambique.

Liberia is struggling to rebuild after a 14-year civil war that ended in 2003 and U.N. peacekeepers, multilateral agencies and donors have been working on projects that seek to deliver a peace dividend by repairing roads and restoring electricity.

Zoellick said the Bank could be more supportive at an earlier stage of a country's recovery, when governments were still trying to organize themselves but lacked the capacity to deliver basic services to an expectant population.

"We have to figure out some way to get some additional private capital in this," he told reporters in Monrovia.

"My sense is that the earlier we can create jobs, the more it will help develop support for governments and their longer term plans," Zoellick said.

"There are steps we can take with microfinance, trade financing and perhaps initial investment from some of our financial institutions," he added.

Zoellick said post-conflict governments faced a shortage of skilled workers, with many professionals having left the country and living abroad. The challenge was to either quickly train new professionals or compensate and attract back those who had left.

Since his appointment to head the World Bank more than six months ago, Zoellick has said the Bank needs to be more flexible when dealing with fragile or post-conflict states, including making financing available to them for longer periods.

The World Bank chief said he was aware of shortcomings by donors to deliver aid promptly, and of the need to speed up the process of clearing the arrears of countries that have fallen behind in payments to multilateral lenders.

Liberia's Finance Minister Antoinette Sayeh said the meeting with Zoellick was a unique opportunity for West African states with similar problems to share their thoughts with the Bank.

"I think hearing all at once from countries with similar circumstances really gives him a sense that there are real issues that are common across these types of countries that still need to be addressed," Sayeh told Reuters.

PEACE IN WEST AFRICA

"It is not every day you have the whole region emerging in a way that we are all getting over our crises. For the first time in so many years we have a peaceful West Africa," she added.

Earlier, Zoellick met donors and U.N. officials to kick-start discussions to fund Liberia's infrastructure needs, which the government has put at between $700-800 million, mostly for rebuilding roads.

Liberia has struggled to attract private companies to help it with road building, mostly because of the high costs to firms of bringing equipment to the country.

Chinese firms have expressed interest in doing the job but want to be sure that if they spend the money importing the equipment, they can get contracts to make it worth the cost.

The World Bank is overseeing a multi-donor trust fund for Liberia's infrastructure needs, with $90 million already collected from donors such as Sweden and Germany.