Alongside its better-known sister agencies, the UNDP may seem a dull workhorse, lacking the star quality of Unicef or the World Food Programme.
Perhaps that’s because its remit – supporting democratic governance, poverty reduction, crisis prevention, improving resilience and strengthening earnings – is too all-encompassing to lend itself to the kind of catchy slogans that might capture the public’s imagination. The UNDP prides itself on its “thought leadership” – not a particularly poster-friendly concept.
The UNDP has an annual budget of about $5bn and works in about 170 countries. Its programmes are diverse to say the least: solar energy projects in Mali; helping Liberia prepare for the the election of Africa’s first woman president in 2005; empowering women in Somalia; employing young people in the Central African Republic to repair roads in an attempt to end the vicious sectarian violence that has claimed thousands of lives since 2013; and making sure staff battling Ebola in west Africa this year were paid.
Last year, the UNDP says it created nearly 1m jobs in low-income communities. It says it helped to register 18 million new voters worldwide. It helped ensure that antiviral medication was provided to 1.4 million people infected with HIV/Aids.
It is also big on data – again, not a crowd pleaser but ever more important as the world embarks on a new development agenda that will be worth little if the indicators to measure progress do not work. The UNDP’s annual human development report, and the accompanying index, are baseline tools for those working in development.
While you may not be familiar with the UNDP, you will perhaps recognise its administrator, Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand who has been tipped as a successor to secretary general Ban Ki-moon when he steps down in 2016. She is the UN’s third highest ranking official.
Clark, who has argued that the UN “has to be made to work” and suggests that the 70th anniversary of the body’s creation this year might be a good time to think about change, has also trimmed the UNDP. Staff positions at the New York headquarters are being reduced by around 30%, with more staff moving out to regional hubs. The agency has around 6,500 employees.
The UNDP also coordinates international and national efforts to achieve the millennium development goals, which expire this year. So it will need to be lean and mean if it is to do the same with the more ambitious post-2015 development agenda, comprising 17 goals and 169 targets.
In praise of …
A skilled carpenter, Dhal Bahadur Karki spent much of his adult life working as a labourer in Nepal. Frustrated at the poor wages and insecurity, he paid a human resources agent a hefty sum to travel to the United Arab Emirates to work. But when he reached Dubai, he didn’t get the carpenter job he was promised.
Detained for working illegally and deported back to Nepal, Karki was faced with more troubles: no job, a family of six to take care of, and the social stigma of returning from abroad without having earned any money. “I was almost depressed,” he says.
The Micro-Enterprise Development Programme (MEDEP), a poverty reduction project run by the government of Nepal and the UNDP, helped him set up a small business.
Karki now employs five people at his furniture factory in Namdu, some 100 miles from the capital, and his products have found markets as far away as Kathmandu.
“I had carpentry skills but had no idea about entrepreneurship, loan facilities and market linkages. MEDEP helped me realise the potential of starting up an enterprise in which I could work, as well as own an enterprise,” Karki said.
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