2007 Annual Report

UNDP and a Reforming UN: A catalyst for change

As part of ongoing UN reform, UNDP has been actively engaged in stepping up closer coordination as a chance to significantly reduce the administrative burdens on developing countries, especially those with already over-stretched capacities.

Post-conflict countries have an especially strong need for cooperation, because their capacities to absorb and manage what can be a flood of new resources are the weakest. A recent review of the funds by the World Bank and several bilateral donors concluded that a single mechanism for managing resources allows for faster implementation of activities, the collection of information on which interventions are most successful, and consistent and comprehensive financial reporting to donors. In countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq and Sudan, UNDP is playing a leading role in administering multi-donor trust funds that pool billions of dollars in contributions to humanitarian relief and development. A review of UNDP’s administration of the UNDG Iraq Trust Fund by PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded that UNDP had gone above and beyond its compliance requirements in terms of public transparency and reporting.

Rwanda holds a world record in the number of women in Parliaments: nearly 50 percent. In February 2007, Rwanda hosted 400 delegates for a Women Parlia-mentarians International conference on "Gender, Nation Building and the Role of Parliaments." Rwandan women parlia-mentarians here interact with Gertrude Mongella (second from left), President of the Pan-African Parliament. Rwanda is one of eight countries piloting unified UN activities.

At the end of 2006, UNDP began administering the UN’s new global Peacebuilding Fund. As a global fund, it has the flexibility to offer resources to individual countries when other funding mechanisms may not be readily available. Mandated to strengthen essential services and capacities to maintain peace in post-conflict countries, the fund had already attracted an infusion of US$136 million from 28 donor governments by early 2007, and begun disbursing support for better public administration, the rule of law and youth employment in Burundi and Sierra Leone.

Non-conflict countries can also reap the benefits of greater UN coordination. Working together, UN country teams can help them orchestrate the full range of policies and programmes—social, political, economic and environmental—they need to foster inclusive development and reach the MDGs. In many countries, UNDP already has a long history of working with governments on activities that connect different social and economic sectors: the design of national development policies, the measurement of the MDGs, and the cultivation of economic and governance capacities. Through its coordination role, and given its strength and outreach as the UN’s largest development agency, UNDP can serve as a bridge between the UN system and overall national development strategies, including by drawing attention to proven expertise in other agencies.

For instance, in Yemen, the Government turned to the UN system for assistance with an MDG assessment. Under the leadership of the Resident Coordinator, the UN agencies in Yemen worked closely together on a comprehensive programme of support. The UN and other development partners steered the process through thematic working groups, some of which had been created for Yemen’s poverty reduction strategy paper. Each UN agency offered specialized skills—UNDP and the ILO on economic growth; UNDP on the environment, decentralization and gender; the UN Population Fund and the World Health Organization (WHO) on health and population; and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme on food security. Yemen’s latest national development strategy, which began in 2006, draws extensively upon the results of the assessment. It integrates all key issues related to achieving the MDGs, and contains precise targets and specific actions on priorities such as economic growth, access to safe drinking water and girls’ education. Yemen is now using the assessment for talks on membership with the Gulf Cooperation Council. Along with a public investment plan supported by UNDP, the assessment also became the basis for a council-sponsored donor conference in late 2006 that raised almost $5 billion for Yemen’s national development strategy.

Other forms of collaboration coalesce around specific development issues. By 2006, joint UN teams on AIDS had been established in about 60 countries, managed by UN Resident Coordinators. In Lesotho, one of the countries most affected by HIV and AIDS, a joint UN team on AIDS has merged technical and financial resources to help the Government establish a National AIDS Commission and a National AIDS Strategic Plan to tackle the epidemic; it addresses issues from education to drug access. Standardized indicators measure progress, and a unified database system captures variations in prevalence rates and other critical data. This tool supports the consistent and routine sharing of information among the commission, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, and international development partners such as the UN, the US Government and the World Bank. The UN system has aligned its own menu of joint programmes behind the national strategy.

At the start of 2007, UNDP joined the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in launching the Poverty and Environment Facility in Nairobi, Kenya. Building on a successful earlier joint initiative, it will support developing countries in integrating sound environmental management into poverty reduction and growth policies. The Climate Partnership, another collaborative venture, will assist seven African nations as they begin to “climate proof” their economies, including through better navigation of the international system of emissions credits. The countries include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

In countries such as Rwanda, UNDP and UNEP are already helping to develop national capacities for assessing economic and environmental connections, and integrating these into national poverty reduction strategies. The two agencies have brought together officials from the realms of finance, agriculture, the environment, infrastructure and local governance to work on stronger, more consistent policies. Joint support in 2006 assisted the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning in moving in this direction by calculating, for the first time, the economic costs of environmental degradation. Falling water supplies, for example, have caused energy shortfalls, which in turn reduce prospects for livelihoods.

To strengthen UN and civil society partnerships, given the critical inputs civil society organizations can make to UN programmes, in 2006, UNDP continued leading the appointment of civil society focal points on a number of UN country teams. In 2007, UNDP began leading the establishment of a global UN Civil Society Trust Fund, on behalf of the UN Development Group. This fund, established by the then Secretary-General in response to the 2004 report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on UN-Civil Society relations led by former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, will advance UN coordination by providing seed money to UN country teams pursuing innovative initiatives with civil society organizations.

Responding to UN General Assembly recommendations, UNDP continues to work with other UN agencies and within its own programmes to champion a UN-wide focus on national capacity development as the key for countries to manage their own sustainable and equitable development paths, including through South-South cooperation. UNDP is also supporting better networking of the UN’s rich reserves of development policy knowledge. This should ensure that UN expertise flows more readily into development partnerships, as UNDP can already affirm through the recognized value of its in-house knowledge networks. In many respects, UNDP has used its own operations, which have rapidly evolved in recent years, to demonstrate what can be achieved by updating and innovating UN practices in response to changing needs.