priority to the recommendations contained in the ILO’s Global Jobs Pact, and to integrate the Pact into its operational activities when implementing the UNDP Strategic Plan, 2008-2013. Although there are many good examples of UNDP collaboration with ILO at the country level, given the important role of employment in the poverty reduction process, collaboration has been limited. Many evaluations of UNDP programmes have noted this anomaly. The ADR for Turkey noted that UNDP’s gender equality projects in poverty reduction had the potential to yield more sustainable results if there had been cooperation with ILO in the field of decent work for women. Sometimes cooperation is envisaged but does not work out: for instance, a recent outcome evaluation in Azerbaijan136 highlights that there was no explicit cooperation with ILO, even though a joint contribution towards the UNDAF outcome was foreseen. Yet another case of missed opportunities was in Lao PDR. While UNDP was offering support to the Chamber of Commerce with a view to strengthening the small and medium enterprises, the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare was trying at the same time, in collaboration with ILO, to help the unemployed youth to take up opportunities for business start-ups. The support from ILO was largely limited to technical assistance, and the lack of finance was felt to be a serious handicap. The ADR for Lao PDR notes that there was clearly an opportunity here for UNDP to join hands with UNCDF and ILO to work through the Chamber of Commerce and the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare to address the problem of access to finance facing small and medium enterprises, and thereby create more opportunities for employment creation at the lower end of the income scale.137
Most UNDP country programmes have a poverty portfolio, a cluster of activities whose explicit objective is to contribute towards poverty reduction. As noted earlier, some of these activities do not in practice have an explicit poverty orientation. There is widespread evidence, however, that even when downstream activities within the poverty portfolio do have an explicit poverty focus, they address mostly the income dimension of poverty rather than the broader concept of human poverty. The concern with human poverty would entail attempts to advance human development in all its dimensions, including such non-income dimensions as education and health. These broader concerns are to some extent captured in a number of upstream activities – for example, in the production of NHDRs and MDG reports and in strengthening the capacity of statistical agencies to collect and report data that are relevant to human development and the MDGs. Often this work – and especial the MDGRs – is done in close partnership with other members of the UN Country Team. They are also captured through UNDP support to strengthening service delivery at the local level. UNDP often works closely with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) in this area and often partner to promote and facilitate volunteerism in the countries where they work. The fact that most programme countries participate in joint programming through the UNDAF exercise facilitates such partnerships. UNDAF programming principles include the MDGs and, therefore, an implicit focus on multidimensional poverty. In addition, mechanisms such as the MDG Achievement Fund require UN agency collaboration in addressing constraints to achieving the MDGs.138 At the policy level, the MAF is another mechanism that facilitates joint UN system work. However, many downstream activities in the poverty portfolio are concerned almost
136. For the project titled ‘Development of National Social Protection System and Implementation of Selected Activities of the National Employment Strategy’. 137. UNDP Evaluation Office, ‘Assessment of Development Results: Evaluation of UNDP Contribution: Lao PDR’, New York, 2011. 138. All MDG Achievement Fund programmes are joint programmes and bring together an average of six United Nations agencies within 130 active programmes in five countries.
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C hapter 4 . A S S E S S M E N T O F U N D P ’ S C O N T R I B U T I O N