UNDP to re-engineer funding strategy

What next for UNAIDS?

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), charged with promoting development projects in the second UN Development Decade, faced a serious financial crisis during the first half of the 1970s. In this paper I investigate the UNDP's budgetmaking to determine the sources of its financial crisis. Unlike municipal, state or national governments, this analysis finds that the UNDP, which is financed by voluntary contributions from member states, is less likely to use an incremental method of budgetmaking. The financial conditions strongly constrain the budgetmaking of the UNDP. However, the UNDP Secretariat's estimates of available resources for technical assistance have been optimistic, allowing the agency rapidly to expand its activities in response to the demand of developing countries, but also leading to the UNDP's serious financial crisis.

Scholarship on the administration of international organizations (IOs) has extensively discussed how autonomy influences their performance. While some argue that autonomy increases performance through greater adaptability, others warn that it may increase the risk of agency slack. Authors typically distinguish between three types of performance: output, outcome, and impact performance. We focus on core funding as a key source of IO autonomy and argue that projects with more core funding show decreased output performance but an increased outcome and impact performance. Our empirical analysis relies on results from data on up to 3590 development projects run by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 128 recipient countries between 2004 and 2020. Subsequently, we test the impact of more core funding on project volumes (output performance), objectives achieved in individual projects (outcome performance), and their effects on sub‐national human development in project regions (impact performance). Our findings suggest that, although reliance on core resources is associated with lower output performance (less funding), it may result in stronger outcome and impact performance, as reflected by more objectives achieved and a higher sub‐national HDI where UNDP projects are implemented. Our findings have important implications for debates on the effectiveness of global governance.

Donors lose faith in Zambian Health Ministry

This volume provides a short and accessible introduction to the organization that serves as the primary coordinator of the work of the UN system throughout the developing world –the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The book: traces the origins and evolution of UNDP, outlining how a central UN funding mechanism and field network developed into a more comprehensive development agency evaluates the UNDP’s performance and results, both in its role as system coordinator and as a development organization in its own right considers the return of the UNDP to a more central role within the UN development system, in order to review the successive attempts at UN development system reform, the reasons for failure and the future possibilities for a more effective system with the UNDP at the centre. Offering a clear, comprehensive overview and analysis of the organization, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of development studies, international organizations and international relations.

The purpose of this essay is to show how the United Nations system including the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and such specialized agencies as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UNESCO, and the International Labour Organization (ILO), etc. has been incorporated into the international network of aid agencies and to discuss some of the consequences for host countries. Specifically the UN development system has been coopted into providing what is known as preinvestment which paves the way for investors of all kinds, generally foreign investors. Preinvestment is a kind of technical which consists of sending ''experts (generally from the specialized agencies) and equipment to a host country and financing fellowship trainees from the country. Preinvestment projects were designed especially to identify and prepare projects for investors, particularly the World Bank and other international financial institutions. In this way the UNDP joins the other agencies in financing the infrastructure necessary for further productive investment, public and private, local and foreign. I show how this occurs in Colombia by describing the country programing exercise of 1971. Country programing is the process by which the resident representative of UNDP and the host government agree upon a list of technical projects that UNDP will finance over a five-year period. Colombia provides an excellent case study. A prime example of an open or outward-looking economy, Colombia has been selected by many international aid agencies as a testing ground for their various programs. In 1948-1949 it was the first nation to be surveyed by an economic mission of the World Bank. In the 1960s it was one of the first four nations to have a consultative group organized by the World Bank. In 1969-1970 it was chosen to be a test case for comprehensive preinvestment planning by the Bank. In 1969 the ILO selected Colombia as the first nation to study under its World Employment Program (International Labour Organization, 1970). It hoped to convince the Colombian government to try ILO strategies for coping with employment problems. In 1971 Colombia became one of the original eighteen nations to undertake country programing with the UNDP. Colombia was also one of the original Latin American nations to receive assistance from the Alliance for Progress. According to the study prepared

Reaching the Poor and Vulnerable in Africa Through Social Safety Nets

Male perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV) is under-researched. In this Article, we present data for the prevalence of, and factors associated with, male perpetration of IPV from the UN Multi-country Cross-sectional Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific. We aimed to estimate the prevalence of perpetration of partner violence, identify factors associated with perpetration of different forms of violence, and inform prevention strategies.We undertook standardised population-based household surveys with a multistage representative sample of men aged 18–49 years in nine sites in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Papua New Guinea between January, 2011, and December, 2012. We built multinomial regression models of factors associated with lifetime violence perpetration: physical IPV, sexual IPV, both physical and sexual IPV, multiple emotional or economic IPV versus none, and calculated population-attributable fractions. In the analysis, we considered factors related to social characteristics, gender attitudes and relationship practices, victimisation history, psychological factors, substance misuse, and participation in violence outside the home.10 178 men completed interviews in our study (between 815 and 1812 per site). The response rate was higher than 82·5% in all sites except for urban Bangladesh (73·2%) and Sri Lanka (58·7%). The prevalence of physical or sexual IPV perpetration, or both, varied by site, between 25·4% (190/746; rural Indonesia) and 80·0% (572/714; Bougainville, Papua New Guinea). When multiple emotional or economic abuse was included, the prevalence of IPV perpetration ranged from 39·3% (409/1040; Sri Lanka) to 87·3% (623/714; Bougainville, Papua New Guinea). Factors associated with IPV perpetration varied by country and type of violence. On the basis of population-attributable fractions, we show factors related to gender and relationship practices to be most important, followed by experiences of childhood trauma, alcohol misuse and depression, low education, poverty, and involvement in gangs and fights with weapons.Perpetration of IPV by men is highly prevalent in the general population in the sites studied. Prevention of IPV is crucial, and interventions should address gender socialisation and power relations, abuse in childhood, mental health issues, and poverty. Interventions should be tailored to respond to the specific patterns of violence in various contexts. Physical and sexual partner violence might need to be addressed in different ways.Partners for Prevention—a UN Development Programme, UN Population Fund, UN Women, and UN Volunteers regional joint programme for gender-based violence prevention in Asia and the Pacific; UN Population Fund Bangladesh and China; UN Women Cambodia and Indonesia; UN Development Programme in Papua New Guinea and Pacific Centre; and the Governments of Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden.

Implementing the International Conferences on Populatoin and Development (ICPD) 1994, Cairo and Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) 1995, Beijing

Story processing bibliography

Prevalence of and factors associated with male perpetration of intimate partner violence: findings from the UN Multi-country Cross-sectional Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific.

The organizational structure, activities and routines, and original staff of the United Nations system – and, in particular, the UN development system – were, to a significant degree, legacies of late nineteenth-century inter-imperial cooperation. This cooperation, along with the pre-UN international institutions it spawned, was critical to the imperial governments’ strategies of pursuing the most rapid industrial development possible while remaining separate political systems. To encourage growth of the industries of the second industrial revolution, the imperial powers (joined by a few smaller European states) established inter-imperial institutions (rules and organizations) to create and secure a global market for industrial goods. These institutions survived the Great War and the depression, and were re-chartered at the end of the Second World War as the UN system. The organizations of the UN system soon gained fundamentally new capabilities to serve the non-industrialized world, or, at least to serve powerful groups there. The cascading decolonization that began at the war's end eventually made ‘the UN system’ and ‘the UN development system’ (its operations in the less-industrialized world) all but equivalent. From the beginning, the main mechanism coordinating the UN development system has been the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and its immediate predecessors whose original organizational routines and staff came from the wartime institutions that managed the economies of the Allies’ colonies from North Africa to India as part of the war effort, and from men and women who had administered the later, more progressive stages of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy in Latin America.

Analysts frequently note that the UN was established in very different times, when interstate war dominated the international security agenda and the wave of decolonization had barely begun. The UN's membership was one-quarter the current size. Concepts such as human security, human development, governance, and peacebuilding, if they existed at all, were little used or understood, and it was the rights of and relationships between states (rather than individuals or groups) that enjoyed the spotlight. Some geopolitical fault lines were as pertinent then as now. The first ever General Assembly (GA) resolution called for the elimination of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction, (1) and in its first five years the Security Council was preoccupied by the Middle East, India-Pakistan, Indonesia, the Korean peninsula, and the Balkans. (2) But it is noticeable that Africa, which today represents over 50 percent of the docket of the Council, barely featured in the early days. The structure of the UN still largely reflects its birth. On the intergovernmental side, there was a clear distinction from the outset between the arenas for development issues-the GA and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)--and the forum for peace and security, the Security Council. The same distinction was evident within the UN Secretariat and its agencies, funds, and programs. As a result, two quite different communities-the development community and the conflict management (3) community--evolved, with separate procedures, financial arrangements and decisionmaking forums. Over time, however, and specifically with the end of the Cold War, the international community began to focus on the linkages between peace and development. This necessitated an enormous and ongoing institutional adaptation within the UN, whereby the development and conflict management communities began to work closely together, bridging the gaps created by their separate approaches. In this article I describe that adaptation, with a specific look at its application in Afghanistan. While I take into account both the intergovernmental (the UN as an arena) and the international civil service (the UN as an actor) sides of the UN, (4) my focus is mostly on the latter. On the other hand, major institutional innovations within the UN rarely occur without the explicit sanction of an intergovernmental body--the executive board in the case of an agency such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Security Council and GA political and budget committees in the case of Secretariat departments--and for that reason, I also describe the debates in those bodies. The UN and Development Cooperation The assumption by the UN of development functions was foreseen in the charter and early GA resolutions, (5) but development did not acquire real prominence on the UN agenda until the 1960s. Before then, development assistance was almost exclusively bilateral, but perceptions that multilateral channels were less political and more efficient led to an expansion in multilateral assistance, particularly after the Pearson Report of 1969. Already by the late 1940s, however, assistance to underdeveloped countries was being discussed, and in 1948 the GA approved a budget line for technical assistance (advisory social welfare services) amounting to U.S.$750,000. In 1950, the UN Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA)--the first multilateral development program financed from voluntary contributions--was established. (6) In 1966, EPTA merged with the Special Fund for Economic Development to create the main UN agency for development, UNDP. (7) UNDP was primarily intended as a funding agency, providing funds for and assisting governments with the planning and management of national development programs. Programs were frequently executed by UN specialized agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or by UNDP's own Office for Project Services (spun off in 1995). …

Helminth elimination in the pursuit of sustainable development goals: a "worm index" for human development.

UN Development Programme and non-communicable diseases