United Nations Development Programme

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The United Nations Development Programme found itself paying doctors and nurses in Afghanistan. After the Taliban took over the country, most foreign aid was suspended. The UNDP took responsibility for funding most essential health services there, including the salaries of more than 25,000 health care professionals. This lay well outside its usual development work, and it needed special licencing from the United States government.

  The UNDP is a United Nations agency with a broad mission. It is meant to help countries end poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development. It stresses building local capacity, so that nations can eventually stand on their own. It is the largest development aid agency in the UN system, with offices in 177 countries. Its base is the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

  This documentary asks how such an agency came to exist, and why its founding involved a quarrel between rich and poor nations. It asks who sits on its board, who leads it, and how its money is spent. It asks what the UNDP actually does on the ground. And it asks why a body devoted to good governance has faced serious accusations about its own.

  28465554

• 2. A Compromise Fund

  ›

  On the 22nd of November 1965, the UNDP was founded by merging two older UN programmes. One was the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance, or EPTA, which had been set up in 1949 to support underdeveloped countries. The other was the Special Fund, dating from 1958, which was meant to widen the scope of UN technical assistance. The stated reason for combining them was to avoid duplicated effort.

  The Special Fund was itself the product of a political bargain. The Nordic countries had pushed for a UN-controlled fund, known as the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development, or SUNFED. The United States and other developed countries resisted. They worried that the developing world would dominate such a fund, and they preferred to see it run under the World Bank.

  SUNFED was dropped, and the Special Fund took its place as a compromise. It offered no investment capital. Its job was only to help create the conditions in which private investment could follow.

  Then the United States proposed and created the International Development Association inside the World Bank's umbrella. That left EPTA and the Special Fund looking as if they were doing similar work. In 1962, the UN Economic and Social Council asked the Secretary-General to weigh the merits and drawbacks of merging the technical assistance programmes. The merger itself is dated to 1966, the same year the first administrator took office.

  The General Assembly had already settled one question before the new agency began work. It had decided who would hold the majority of seats on its governing board.

  81591112

• 3. Board and Administrators

  ›

  The UNDP executive board has 36 members, elected by the UN Economic and Social Council according to the UN regional groups. When the agency was created in 1965, the General Assembly gave developing countries a simple majority of seats, 19 to 17. The original allocation was 7 seats for the African Group, 6 for the Asian Group, and 6 for the Latin American Group. The Western European and Others Group held 14 seats, and the Eastern European Group held 3.

  Today the board is divided differently. The African Group holds 8 seats, the Asia-Pacific Group 7, and the Latin American and Caribbean Group 5. The Western European and Others Group holds 12, and the Eastern European Group holds 4.

  Two placements break the usual pattern. Yugoslavia was counted among the developing countries and put in the Latin American Group. Japan was placed in the Western European and Others Group, where it remains, while South Korea sits in the Asia-Pacific Group.

  Paul G. Hoffman, the first administrator, had previously led the Economic Cooperation Administration, which ran the Marshall Plan. He served from 1966 to 1972. Later holders included Bradford Morse, a former Republican congressman from Massachusetts, and William Draper, an American venture capitalist and friend of George H. W. Bush. Mark Malloch Brown of the United Kingdom came to the post from a vice presidency at the World Bank and later became UN Deputy Secretary-General. Kemal Derviş had been finance minister of Turkey and a senior World Bank official.

  The administrator holds the rank of Under-Secretary-General. The job is often called the third highest in the UN, after the Secretary-General and the Deputy Secretary-General, though that ranking has never been formally codified. The Secretary-General appoints the administrator, the General Assembly confirms the choice, and the term runs four years. The source adds that five countries on the board have some influence over the selection.

  Achim Steiner served from 2017 until June 2025, when his second term ended. Haoliang Xu then stepped in as acting administrator, and the list of holders names Alexander De Croo as the tenth, starting in 2025. Xu had been Associate Administrator since June 2023, replacing Usha Rao-Monari of India.

  Below the administrator, regional bureaus are headed by officials such as Kanni Wignaraja of Sri Lanka, who leads the Bureau for Asia and Pacific.

  1718575871

• 4. Money and Measurement

  ›

  In 2025, the UNDP's budget was US$6,822.20 million. Every dollar comes from voluntary contributions by UN member states, since the agency has no assessed dues.

  For the years 2012 to 2016, its International Aid Transparency Initiative publications record committed funding that totals US$19,799.6 million. The annual figure climbed from US$2,939.5 million in 2012 to US$5,163.6 million in 2016. The UNDP says this data covers 100 percent of its development flows.

  The biggest single sector over those five years was security system management and reform, at US$3,057.9 million. Next came the control of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS, at US$2,198.1 million. Public sector policy and administrative management followed with US$1,807.7 million. Support to subnational government came to US$1,731.1 million, and reconstruction relief and rehabilitation to US$1,668.2 million.

  Elections drew US$1,184.7 million over the period. That spending peaked at US$330.3 million in 2014 and fell to US$149.8 million in 2016. Human rights, by comparison, received US$270.8 million.

  Publish What You Fund ranked the UNDP first on its Aid Transparency Index in both 2015 and 2016, with a score of 93.3 percent.

  The agency spends about 0.2 percent of its budget on internal evaluation of its programmes. Its Evaluation Office belongs to the UN Evaluation Group, which has 43 members and 3 observers.

  1920212236

• 5. Five Challenges

  ›

  The UNDP organizes its work around five development challenges. The first is democratic governance. Here the agency supports national democratic transitions with policy advice and technical help. It builds institutions, educates people about reform, encourages negotiation and dialogue, and shares experience from other countries.

  The second is poverty reduction. At the national level, the UNDP helps governments design anti-poverty strategies and widen access to resources. At the macro level, it works on trade reform, debt relief and foreign investment. In Brasília, its International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth hosts South-South policy dialogue and has worked with more than 7,000 officials from more than 50 countries.

  A 2013 evaluation judged that the UNDP had effectively helped governments change policies in ways that benefit the poor. It also found a strong need for better measurement of results. The Strategic Plan for 2014 to 2017 incorporated the evaluation's recommendations.

  The third challenge is crisis prevention and recovery. Prevention programmes tackle small arms proliferation, the impact of natural disasters and the use of diplomacy to head off violence. Recovery programmes cover disarmament and the reintegration of ex-combatants, demining, the return of displaced people, restored basic services and transitional justice.

  The fourth is environment and energy, which the agency links to poverty because poor people suffer most from degraded land and lack of clean water and energy. Its Equator Initiative offers the Equator Prize every two years to indigenous communities that reduce poverty through conserving biodiversity. In rural Mali, the UNDP sponsored 45 diesel-driven Multifunction Platforms between 1996 and 1998, powering pumps, grain mills and appliances. By 2004, Mali had 500 of them.

  In 2012, the Biodiversity Finance Initiative, known as BIOFIN, was established. It brings together 30 countries to build evidence-based plans for financing the protection of biodiversity.

  The fifth challenge is HIV/AIDS. In 2012, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, which the UNDP convened, issued its report.

  2527293031

• 6. Reports, Centres and Coordination

  ›

  Since 1991, the UNDP has published the Human Development Report every year. It carries the annual Human Development Index, and the Gender Inequality Index is among the topics it has discussed.

  Six Global Policy Centres extend the agency's reach. The Seoul Policy Centre focuses on partnerships, and the Nairobi centre on resilient ecosystems and desertification. Singapore hosts two: the Global Centre for Technology, Innovation and Sustainable Development, and the Global Centre for Public Service Excellence, which sends out an email newsletter called the Raffles Review. The Istanbul International Centre for Private Sector in Development and the Oslo Governance Centre complete the six.

  In 2014, with support from the Government of Denmark, the UNDP set up its Innovation Facility to fund promising development ideas. It offers technical help and seed money to partners across 170 countries and territories. In 2015 alone, it invested in 62 initiatives across 45 countries, aimed at 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

  The Hub for Innovative Partnerships runs programmes such as the ART Global Initiative, the World Alliance of Cities Against Poverty and the Territorial Approach to Climate Change. Another is the Africa-Kazakhstan Partnership for the SDGs.

  In 1997, the Secretary-General created the United Nations Development Group to make UN development work more effective in individual countries. The Deputy Secretary-General chairs it, and the UNDP Administrator serves as vice-chair. Its field arm is the Resident Coordinator system, whose coordinators lead UN country teams in more than 130 countries. Each one is the Secretary-General's designated representative for development operations.

  3739404133

• 7. Early Controversies

  ›

  In December 2013, documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that British and American intelligence agencies had listed the UNDP among their surveillance targets, alongside the US National Security Agency's other interests. Other targets included UNICEF, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Economic Community of West African States.

  In August 2016, Israel's Shin Bet security agency announced the arrest of Wahid Abdallah al Bursh, a Palestinian engineer employed by the UNDP. Shin Bet said he had confessed to being recruited in 2014 to help Hamas. It claimed he used UNDP resources to build a maritime jetty for Hamas fighters, though it gave no further details. Shin Bet also claimed he persuaded his superiors to prioritize neighbourhoods with Hamas operatives when assigning reconstruction funds in Gaza, devastated by the 2014 war with Israel.

  The UNDP's finances in North Korea drew criticism from members of its own staff and from the Bush administration in the United States. Artjon Shkurtaj claimed he found counterfeit US dollars in the programme's safe, even though staff were paid in euros. The UNDP denied keeping improper accounts or any other wrongdoing.

  In mid-2006, the UNDP halted its disarmament programmes in the Karamoja region of Uganda. Inner City Press first reported the decision, followed by New Vision. The agency acted because of human rights abuses in the forcible disarmament campaigns run in parallel by the Uganda People's Defence Force.

  4243444546

• 8. Russia and Iraq Scandals

  ›

  In August 2019, Foreign Policy published an article titled "Greed and Graft at U.N. Climate Program." It reported on a UNDP Global Environment Facility project in Russia, with a budget of US$7.8 million, to set energy efficiency standards and labels. A 2017 final evaluation found the project had not met its goals. A confidential audit appendix cited "strong indicators of deliberate misappropriation" of millions of dollars between 2010 and 2014.

  The article said whistleblowers Dmitry Ershov and John O'Brien, along with other consultants, had raised concerns over many years. Their concerns were first reported internally in 2011. According to the article, superiors in Istanbul, New York and Washington, and donor governments including the United States, largely dismissed or ignored them.

  In March 2020-12 donor governments wrote to UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner demanding an independent review. The Financial Times reported on the 'systemic nature' of the problems. In January 2021, the review was published under the title "Systems and Silos." It found irregularities and concluded that UNDP had not managed the project "either efficiently or effectively." It said individuals were able to 'game the relatively weak systems of governance and technical capacity.' It suggested returning the entire management fee to the Global Environment Facility as restitution. In early 2021, the Netherlands withheld some 10 million euros in funding.

  In February 2022, Transparency International, the Whistleblower International Network and the Government Accountability Project wrote to Steiner about whistleblower protection for O'Brien and Ershov. Ershov claimed he was "pushed out of his U.N. job" after raising procurement concerns at the end of 2014. In June 2022, BBC Two aired a 90-minute documentary, The Whistleblowers: Inside the UN, which included O'Brien's case. It reported that he was fired from UNDP in March 2022, days after his BBC interview. The Guardian said the film exposed "a toxic culture."

  On the 22nd of January 2024, the Guardian reported corruption in the US$1.88 billion Funding Facility for Stabilisation in Iraq. It found some 136 corruption allegation cases at the UNDP's Office of Audit and Investigations, most against suppliers rather than employees. On the 5th of February 2024, it reported that the UNDP had commissioned an internal management review, and that several donors wanted an independent one, as had happened in the Russian case.

  4849505152