SECOND COMMITTEE BEGINS REVIEW OF OPERATIONAL ACTIVITIES FOR DEVELOPMENT, PANELLISTS DISCUSS UN DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE FRAMEWORK
Press Release
GA/EF/2824
SECOND COMMITTEE BEGINS REVIEW OF OPERATIONAL ACTIVITIES FOR DEVELOPMENT, PANELLISTS DISCUSS UN DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE FRAMEWORK
19981014 There was a need to harmonize and streamline operational procedures for development said Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), as the Second Committee this afternoon held a panel discussion on the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF). The panel was part of the Committee's consideration of operational activities for development.Ms. Sadik added that a key factor in operational activities was funding and resources, and providing those resources was a responsibility shared by the programme and the donor countries. Better utilization of existing funds was required and it was imperative to mobilize additional resources. A new trend to provide more predictable, stable and increasing resources for development activities should be ensured.
A number of other speakers on the panel also stressed the need for additional resources and funding for development. John Powell, Director of the Strategy and Policy Division of the World Food Programme (WFP), said there were serious resource constraints which limited the reach and effectiveness of the operational activities of the agencies, funds and programmes. He also called for greater coordination between relief and development efforts. An inherent conflict between relief and development existed, and there was a need for integrating resources towards rehabilitation, reconstruction and recovery.
Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said UNDAF should be the primary United Nations instrument to strategically respond to a country's development challenges, and that the United Nations global agenda should form the core of the UNDAF agenda. The UNDAF should also work to strengthen the capacity of host governments to implement their development programmes and strengthen the relationship between the United Nations and host governments.
Stressing the need to improve country teams and resident coordinators, Gustav Speth, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator, said UNDP had issued stern and clear guidance to coordinators and those guidelines had been pursued vigorously. The pool from which resident coordinators were
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drawn had been widened and they were now more diverse in terms of gender. More work needed to be done, however, to improve country teams, particularly in examining how they could identify crises early.
Introducing the reports before the Committee on operational activities were: Nitin Desai, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs; Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF; John Ohiorhenuan, Director of the Special Unit for technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC) for UNDP; Noeleen Heyzer, Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM); and Louis-Dominique Ouedraogo, Inspector from the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU).
Speaking on operational activities, the representative of Indonesia said that the triennial policy review of operational activities could not be considered in isolation from the precarious situation of the world economy. During the past year, globalization had exposed developing countries to greater risks than anticipated and had led to pervasive setbacks. The policy review should allow Members to search for the best practices to implement the mandates and to further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the United Nations operational activities.
The Second Committee will meet again at 10 a.m. on Thursday, 15 October, to resume its consideration of operational activities for development.
Committee Work Programme
The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) met this afternoon to consider operational activities for development. It also planned to hold a panel discussion on "United Nations Development Assistance Framework". The panellists were to include: James Gustave Speth, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Nafis Sadik, Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA); Carol Bellamy, Executive Director, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); and John Powell, Director, Strategy and Policy Division, World Food Programme (WFP).
Before the Committee was a report of the Secretary-General on the triennial comprehensive policy review of operational activities for development of the United Nations system (document A/53/226/Add. 1-4). The report charts the course of the operational activities of the United Nations system into the first years of the coming millennium.
In recent years, the range and diversity of operational activities have increased considerably in response to the growing diversity of situations and demands facing the United Nations system, the report states. The growing range and complexity of demands for United Nations system operational activities make it increasingly necessary for the United Nations development system to deepen its relations not only with Governments but also with society at large. In particular, the system's effort to contribute to the integrated implementation, at the national level, of global plans of action can only succeed if countries perceive the United Nations development system as an integral instrument in their development effort. That required the introduction of new and more flexible coordination and programming processes.
The Secretary-General recommends that the General Assembly identify areas where further progress is required in improving operational effectiveness. It may also wish to stress the importance of more effective collaboration among all development actors and address the issue of achieving greater coherence within the system in the provision of policy guidance on programme priority matters by various intergovernmental bodies. Operational activities for development should also take into account issues arising from globalization.
The Secretary-General includes in the report recommendations on a number of issues, among them: gender perspective, civil society, resources and funding, capacity building, and cooperation with Bretton Woods institutions.
His recommendations on those topics include:
-- The Assembly may wish to request the United Nations system to increase its efforts to incorporate a gender perspective into all operational activities, particularly within poverty eradication activities.
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-- The United Nations system should continue to expand its relations with national and international elements of civil society, consistent with the desires of governments.
-- The Assembly may wish to, and act on, conclusions of the executive boards of the funds and programmes in order to reverse the declining trend in core resources.
-- The concept of national ownership was at the core of all operational activities. Both the programme approach and national execution should be applied as a means of enhancing national ownership.
-- The Assembly may wish to call for continued efforts to foster cooperation and dialogue among relevant institutions, particularly at the country level, in the assessment of country situations.
Addenda 1, 2 and 3 to the report discuss further the operational activities for development, focusing on field-level coordination, humanitarian assistance and post-conflict peace-building. They also contain comprehensive statistical data on operational activities for development for the years 1996 and 1997. They detail contributions from governments and other sources for operational activities as well as expenditures on such activities by the United Nations system.
Addendum 4 covers the question of strengthening the integration of economic and technical cooperation among developing countries in the operational activities of the United Nations system. The report traces the evolution of economic and technical cooperation among developing countries and describes the role of such cooperation in assisting the developing countries in responding to the challenges presented by globalization and economic liberalization.
The report concludes that economic cooperation among developing countries (ECDC) and technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC) are still not optimally integrated in the operational activities of the United Nations system due to a number of major constraints. Those constraints include the persistence of attitudinal barriers against such cooperation, a continuing lack of appreciation of their potential and inadequate financial resources made available for them.
The Secretary-General recommends that a number of specific measures be adopted to strengthen the integration of ECDC and TCDC into operational activities.
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Those recommendations include:
-- United Nations organizations and agencies should seek to identify suitable opportunities to promote joint cooperation arrangements to bring their various skills to bear in multisectoral initiatives.
-- All organizations should seek to ensure that TCDC and ECDC are given first consideration in the design, formulation, implementation and evaluation of their operational activities.
-- Regional commissions should play an increasingly active role in promoting and supporting TCDC and ECDC activities for strategic importance.
-- United Nations organizations and agencies should seek to arrive at a common understanding of TCDC and ECDC in keeping with the definition and criteria already established for identifying such activities.
-- TCDC and ECDC should be systematically integrated into the follow-up strategies to major United Nations conferences.
Also before the Second Committee was a report of the Secretary-General on progress on the implementation of the World Declaration and Plan of Action from the World Summit for Children (document A/53/186). The report was requested by the General Assembly with the adoption of resolution 51/186 of 16 December 1996. The Assembly had decided to convene a special session in 2001 to review the achievements of the goals of the World Summit for Children held in 1990.
The report noted that while there had been important progress since mid-decade in meeting many of the targets agreed upon in 1990, much remains to be done if all of the goals for children are to be accomplished at the global level by the year 2000. It calls on governments to renew their commitment which could be met with strong political commitment, widespread participation of stakeholders and the provision of adequate resources and international support.
The report notes that the cause of children is hindered by the decline of official development assistance (ODA) which as a proportion of donor countries' combined gross national product (GNP) has declined for two decades. And, since 1990, the number of children affected by emergencies has risen seven-fold and their access to basic social services has become more difficult to obtain. Despite these challenges, the movement for children's and women's rights has continued to gain strength. The report noted that the Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose entry into force coincided with the World Summit for Children in September 1990, has been ratified by all but two countries.
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More progress has been made for the world's children in the past decade than in any comparable period in human history. The most notable achievements were: about seven million lives saved each year as a result of immunization and oral rehydration therapy (ORT); measles deaths have been eliminated in the Latin American and Caribbean region; reported incidence of polio declined from 23,000 to 4,000 cases between 1990 and 1997, immunization currently protects an estimated 700,000 infants per year from neonatal tetanus and 120 countries have virtually eliminated the disease.
Governmental procedures, and those internal to UNICEF in preparation for the special session of the Assembly. National reviews between 1998 and 2000 are envisaged to be based primarily on socio-economic and demographic indicators, and various survey instruments, and issues such as vitamin A levels in blood, learning achievement of adolescents, and under age five mortality rates.
Other types of activities and discussion forums are to be organized at national, regional and global levels, ranging from thematic debates by experts to larger discussion forums organized with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the media and other partners.
Another report before the Committee was a note by the Secretary-General transmitting the report of the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) entitled Fellowships in the United Nations system (document A/53/154). The note recommends that agencies should adopt a uniform format on reporting based on a common definition of fellowships which focuses on quality, relevance and impact. The report also stated that while it was difficult to measure the contribution which fellowships make to capacity building, measures to foster the use of former fellows expertise were called for.
The JIU report made a series of recommendations concerning, among other things, the definition of fellowship, administration of the programmes, establishment of various data banks, evaluation, coordination of programmes and government support. In a specific recommendation, JIU said that the United Nations system should maintain or update data banks of local or regional expertise, taking into account the contribution made by their fellowship programmes to foster an increased use of such expertise. Access to these data banks should be widely open and providers of services to the United Nations system should be encouraged to avail themselves of this expertise.
The report also provides an overview of the fellowships, noting trends in fellowships, fellowship programmes and capacity building, the fellowship process, the contrast between the execution of fellowship programmes by agencies and by governments, and other issues. In addition, the report discussed inter-agency coordination, and coordination within organizations.
The report also recommended investigation of, among other management questions, the possibilities for more cost-effective placements and pooling of
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resources or establishment on a cost-sharing basis of common placement structures funded primarily by participating organizations.
With respect to the United Nations Educational and Training Programme for Southern Africa (UNETPSA), JIU recommends that the Secretary-General, in consultation with the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the host country report to the General Assembly at its fifty-fourth session on the possibility of UNETPSA given a new mandate to capitalize on its experience and serve as a common system placement and supervision mechanism in southern Africa.
The JIU report also recommended that organizations that had not done so should undertake, on their own or within a joint exercise with other interested organizations, an evaluation of their fellowship programmes.
An additional report before the Committee was a note by the Secretary-General transmitting the report of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) on the group's activities. The report provides a review and update on the programme and activities of UNIFEM for the year 1997. It states that during that year, UNIFEM focused on organizational reassessment and giving greater coherence and clarity to its programme directions. In the first quarter of 1997, UNIFEM developed its strategy and business plan, which delineates areas of focus and operations for the period 1997 to 1999.
The UNIFEM has adopted a programme strategy that is designed and guided by an empowerment framework, and is based on the promotion of women's rights, opportunities and capacities, the report states. That empowerment framework is about changing or transforming power relations in favour of those who previously exercised little power over their own lives.
The Fund is committed to intensifying support for programmes that link micro-level and macro-level practical and policy actions in its three thematic areas to meet emerging needs and priorities for gender mainstreaming and for building the capacity of women's organizations as economic and political actors. Those three thematic areas are: strengthening women's economic capacity; engendering governance and leadership; and promoting women's human rights, and eliminating all forms of violence against women.
The report states that UNIFEM's economic empowerment programme focuses on the identification of opportunities for and threats to women's sustainable livelihoods within the context of globalization, trade liberalization and the emergence of new technologies. It supports programmes that are designed to increase options for women, especially those living in poverty, strengthening their economic capacity as entrepreneurs and producers, and creating strategic linkages between producers and support institutions, as well as between producer groups and markets. The report details UNIFEM's activities in each of the three thematic areas.
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SLAMET HIDAYAT (Indonesia), speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 developing countries and China, said that the triennial policy review of operational activities could not be considered in isolation from the precarious situation of the world economy. During the past year, globalization had exposed developing countries to greater risks than anticipated and had led to pervasive setbacks.
This policy review would allow Members to search for the best practices to implement the mandates and to further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the United Nations operational activities. In this context, the "Group of 77" and China stressed the importance of the fundamental characteristics of operational activities, including their universality, voluntary and grant nature, their neutrality and their multilateral orientation.
Continuing, he said the Group sought to assist the developing countries in their leading role for advancing and managing their own development process and emphasized the importance of promoting South-South cooperation. He referred to the broad-based report for the TCDC expressed by the Member States, as well as the Deputy Secretary-General, last week at the twentieth anniversary commemoration of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action and urged UNDP to substantially increase the allocation of core resources to promote TCDC.
Panel Discussion
NAFIS SADIK, Executive Director of the UNFPA, said that harmonization of development programmes and efforts was crucial. There was a need for streamlining and harmonization of a large number of operational procedures. That could be done in the manner in which each United Nations agency defined and facilitated capacity building. There was a tendency to get carried away with the processes of development without sufficiently delivering results. A key factor in operational activities was funding and resources, and providing those resources was a responsibility shared by the programme and the donor countries. Better utilization of existing resources was required, and it was imperative to mobilize additional resources. A new trend to provide more predictable, stable and increasing resources for development activities should be ensured.
CAROL BELLAMY, Executive Director of UNICEF, speaking of United Nations reform, said that the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) was one of the more notable tools of United Nations reform so far. The United Nations specialized agencies and the Bretton Woods institutions had been invited to take part in the pilot phase of the UNDAF process. It was agreed to conduct pilot programmes in Mali and Viet Nam in order to review the interface between UNDAF and the World Bank's country assistance strategy. An assessment team made up of representatives of the UNDP, UNFPA, WFP and UNICEF reviewed the UNDAF experience to date, as did an independent panel of experts.
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It was concluded, she said, among other things, that UNDAF should be the primary United Nations instrument to respond to a country's priorities and development challenges, and that the United Nations' global agenda should form the core of the UNDAF agenda. Also, UNDAF should strengthen the capacity of host governments to implement their development programmes and strengthen the relationship between the United Nations and host governments.
Success in operational activities she said, required full and speedy implementation of the findings of the triennial review which hinged on a key factor: the ready availability of adequate resources, and an early reversal of the overall decline in resources for development.
JAMES GUSTAVE SPETH, UNDP Administrator, said it should be a priority to carry forward reform in development activities and to reinforce the objectives established in relevant United Nations resolutions. It was important to move those objectives into the fullest possible operation because progress had been slow in that area. On the issue of resident coordinators, the UNDP had issued very stern and clear guidance to coordinators, and those guidelines had been pursued vigorously. Their responsibility was to reflect the priorities of the United Nations system. The pool from which resident coordinators were drawn had been widened and many were now from outside UNDP.
There was also more diversity in terms of gender, and there had been a performance appraisal of resident coordinators. More work needed to be done, however, to improve country teams, particularly in examining how they could identify crises early. There was also a need for efforts to bridge the gap between relief and development work. None of those efforts would be successful, however, if the decline in development funding were not halted.
JOHN POWELL, Director, Strategy and Policy Division of the World Food Programme (WFP) said that in countries recovering from crises, relief and development often existed side by side in the same country. In many places, his agency had a major role to play in regard to recovery strategies, yet prevention, preparedness and mitigation measures were often required as part of the procedures. He noted that an inherent conflict between relief and development existed and spoke of the need for integrating resources towards rehabilitation, reconstruction and recovery. Although there had been positive effects of integration in situations of natural disasters, specific lines between emergency relief and development were not as clear as they once were. With the UNDAF process, the United Nations system had the wherewithal to make real progress.
The different sections of the triennial policy review, he said, presented a useful overview of many of the serious resource constraints which limited the reach and effectiveness of the operational activities of the agencies, funds and programs. While he recognized the considerable work already taken in formulating, refining and implementing UNDAF, more work was needed to examine the linkages between them.
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Question-and-Answer Period
Responding to a question on major conference follow-up efforts, Mr. SPETH said that such efforts were a centrepiece of the work of the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) and were part of the dialogue that it had with governments. Actions in that regard would be reported on annually. Four inter-agency task forces provided guidance to country teams on follow-up to conferences. Coordination of those efforts was maintained at Headquarters.
Also on follow-up to conferences, Ms. SADIK said more action was needed in providing guidance to follow-up activities. There had been many general statements on that topic, but there were few specific proposals and guidelines. On the work of UNDAF, she said it had helped to set up a common data system for countries, with the help of governments. Proper country analysis started with a good data system. While UNDAF as a process had not clearly identified the role of governments, that problem would be addressed in the future.
On a question regarding an assessment of UNDAF, Ms. BELLAMY said the results of the pilot experience of UNDAF were positive, but it had not been perfect. The assessments and feed-back from various countries found that governments needed to be more involved in UNDAF's work. There were also costs both in time and financial resources of UNDAF's activities that should be lowered in the future. There were still few reports on the implementation of UNDAF and more information was needed.
Mr. POWELL said that the substantive issues on the agenda for executive committees included how to conduct dialogue, how to consolidate an appeals process and how to work through the UNDAF recovery phase. He noted that it had been necessary in the UNDAF process to keep a common country assessment in view. Also, UNDAF should address issues such as moving from one development phase to another; standing up for principles of human rights and equality for women; and providing security for staff.
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