Viet Nam Becomes A Pilot Country For UN Efforts
Viet Nam Becomes A Pilot Country For UN Efforts To Reform And Improve Efficiency
New York, Dec 8 2006 7:00PM
As part of ongoing United Nations efforts to make itself more efficient and responsive to national needs, Viet Nam today was selected as the first pilot country in the “One UN” reform programme, involving six UN agencies working more closely together to avoid duplication and fragmentation.
“Viet Nam is at the forefront of the UN move to deliver as one. The UN family has to combine the diversity of skills and mandates present in our agencies to realize our tremendous potential as partners in development,” said Kemal Dervis, who heads the UN Development Group and is the Administrator of the UN Development Programme (U῎DP).
The “One UN” pilot programme will include at least five other countries and aims to move beyond coordination to consolidating a single presence in countries, UNDP said in a press release from the Vietnamese capital Hanoi.
This Viet Nam pilot programme
will comprise six participating agencies: the UN
Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UNDP, the UN
Population Fund (UNFPA),
the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM),
UN Volunteers (UNV) and
the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)ᾮ Other agencies
are expected to join or cooperate with the programme in the
near future.
“There was a realization that while we
were doing a good job, we weren’t being fully
efficient,” said UNICEF Representative in Viet Nam Jesper
Morch. “By working together, UNICEF will be
able to deliver far more for Vietnamese children. It seemed
obvious to embrace the idea.” The “One UN” plan
envisions agencies working as one team, with the aim of
avoiding fragmentation and duplication of efforts and
instead ensuring a unity of purpose, coherence in management
and efficiency in operations while maintaining the distinct
personality, agenda, and purpose of the different
agencies. Today’s announcement came after a meeting
between a taskforce on UN reform and the Vietnamese
Government, which also involved participating UN agencies,
funds and programmes, and bilateral donors. “Viet Nam is
always pushing us to do things better, to be ever more
responsive and efficient, and the UN team here is working to
answer that call for more effective assistance,” said UN
Resident Coordinator John Hendra. “With this very
exciting pilot opportunity, Viet Nam is being recognized for
its openness and drive to make the UN work better. In a
sense, this pilot is like bringing global reform efforts
home, and the development community will be very interested
in what happens here as Viet Nam is now literally at the
centre of UN reform efforts. This announcement comes
nearly a month after the UN High-Level Panel on Systemwide
Coherence released its report, Delivering as
One, which recommended, among other things, that the UN
“deliver as one at tAdditional pilot countries will likely
be announced at the end of this
month. Ends