creating opportunities for displaced people to regain productive lives (thereby also reducing the risk of further civil unrest). This also appears to be UNDP’s approach to some extent in Angola, Eritrea and Liberia. In Rwanda, UNDP has offered strong support to the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission as a means of promoting dialogue and development. The commission has participated in the poverty assessment process to mainstream reconciliation and unity in the poverty reduction strategy. The process has helped to sharpen stakeholders’ focus on the linkages among the variety of challenges faced by the country and to build consensus on the strategies and actions needed. A particularly difficult case was Afghanistan where UNDP, for at least the first three years following the Bonn Agreement, was working without a strategic focus. It was relegated to the role of ‘gap filling’, that is, selecting niches that donors were unprepared to address directly rather than work on ‘nation building’. In the process, UNDP claimed a limited niche in the area of ‘early recovery’ as the administrator of last resort for donor funds earmarked for sensitive tasks, but this was achieved at the cost of a more concerted effort to address key institutional changes required for lasting peace. It also risked branding UNDP as a non-substantive agency, a legacy it has had to work hard to overcome, and to some extent has, since 2005. 102 In the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, UNDP’s activities have been informed by the fact that one of the major consequences of transition from a centrally planned to a market-based economy was the emergence of large-scale unemployment – a significant factor affecting poverty. Based on the understanding that unemployment stemmed largely from the mismatch of skills between the education that people had prior to transition and the requirements of the emerging market-based economies, UNDP offered support
to reforming and modernizing vocational education. A number of countries (e.g., Bulgaria, Armenia, Ukraine and Croatia) have implemented projects related to this. Many of these initiatives were undertaken at the downstream level, but the programmes also had upstream components such as support for the legislative and regulatory frameworks, curricula, and standards. There are also other instances where UNDP has imaginatively adapted its poverty focus to the specific national context. A case in point is Bhutan, where public policy is guided by the concept of Gross National Happiness which, in many ways, complements UNDP’s idea of human development. UNDP has successfully aligned its objectives to the Government’s yardstick of Gross National Happiness. In China, an important contribution from UNDP has been to support integration of the MDGs into the Chinese Government’s vision of a Xiaokang society, which in turn is consistent with the human development framework. In Moldova, in view of the country’s history and aspiration to achieve EU integration, UNDP’s upstream activities have placed human rights and gender, along with achievement of the MDGs, at the centre stage of its advocacy role. An evaluation of the country programme records that while UNDP’s contribution towards the monitoring of the MDGs and human development through support for the preparation of analytical reports were appreciated in Moldova, even greater credit was given by all to UNDP’s contribution towards the promotion of human rights and gender equality.103 Finding 2. The resources UNDP devotes to poverty reduction are difficult to determine as poverty is addressed, to a varying degree, in all its focus areas. At a simple level it is possible to track UNDP’s commitment to or priority on poverty reduction
102. UNDP Evaluation Office, ‘Assessment of Development Results: Evaluation of UNDP Contribution: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’, New York, 2009.
103. UNDP Evaluation Office, ‘Assessment of Development Results: Evaluation of UNDP Contribution: Moldova’, New York, 2011.
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