Although poverty reduction had become one of the goals of UNDP its status within the set of goals was not equal: explicit priority was accorded to the goal of reducing poverty. In March 1995 the World Summit on Social Development solidified the global priority of poverty elimination. In a memo to UNDP Resident Representatives61 the following month, the UNDP Administrator James Gustave Speth, stated, Let us make it clear that UNDP is the UN’s anti-poverty organization – a world partnership against poverty.
since. At a practical level, UNDP recognized that the Board’s decision had practical implications for introducing a sharper focus to programming and planned to develop a more distinct anti-poverty focus within the main UNDP thematic areas and to address the multidimensional challenge of poverty elimination from a cross-thematic perspective.65
This means that all UNDP activities in the future will be geared towards, and be measured against, the ultimate goal of poverty eradication. UNDP’s other major programming areas – gender equity, the promotion of jobs and sustainable livelihoods, environmental preservation and regeneration, and governance – which together define UNDP’s sustainable human development framework, will increasingly come under the fold of poverty eradication, which therefore becomes Job One for us.63
As noted above, the WSSD was a watershed in putting poverty reduction back on the agenda and UNDP responded accordingly. The commitment to develop time-bound poverty reduction strategies contained in the WSSD declaration gave UNDP an opportunity to engage with support in this area. In early 1996 UNDP launched its Poverty Strategies Initiative (PSI), a $20 million programme funded by UNDP ($11 million) together with contributions from Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands. The funds were allocated to country-level activities based on national proposals and aimed to support improvements in the analysis of poverty, development of anti-poverty plans and advocacy for poverty alleviation programmes. In 1996 UNDP published the first in a series of reports on poverty66 and the following year 1997 Human Development Report on human poverty67 made an important contribution towards bringing together the core role in poverty reduction with UNDP’s key contribution to development thinking, human development. The report also introduced the Human Poverty Index and facilitated monitoring of multidimensional poverty.
The following year UNDP produced a mission statement at the request of the Executive Board that reiterated that the organization gives ‘first priority to poverty eradication’.64 This priority has been regularly repeated by the Executive Board ever
In 1998, in another attempt to narrow UNDP’s focus, guiding principles were established to help programming at the country level. The principles note that the process of narrowing focus was two-fold the first element being ‘The identification of poverty eradication
Less than three months later at the annual meeting of the UNDP Executive Board, a decision was made to make poverty elimination as the overriding priority in the programme of the United Nations Development Programme.62 The Administrator went on to interpret the board decision and especially the meaning of ‘overriding priority’ writing in a follow-up report on the WSSD:
61. Speth, J. ‘Five Key Goals for UNDP in the Coming Year’, Memorandum to Strategy and Management Committee members and Resident Representatives, 3 April 1995. The memo is an attachment to DP/1996/2 which describes it as UNDP’s first corporate plan. 62. UNDP Executive Board Decision 95/22.
63. UNDP, ‘Poverty Eradication: A Policy Paper for Country Strategies’, New York, 1996. 64. Decision of the Executive Board during 1996 DP/1997/1. Annex to decision 96/29. 65. UNDP, ‘Initiatives for Change: Follow-up to Decision 95/22’, DP/1996/2 para 20.
66. UNDP, ‘Poverty Eradication: A Policy Paper for Country Strategies’, New York, 2006. 67. UNDP, Human Development Report 1997, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.
C hapter 3 . U N D P ’ S S T R A T E G I C R E S P O N S E T O T H E G L O B A L P O V E R T Y C O N T E X T
21