From DC to NYC: Promoting Recommendations for a More Effective UNFPA

CGD is well known in Washington for convening smart and interesting people for good discussions. We don’t have much track record in New York, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when we trekked up to the United Nations last week to release our new report on UNFPA (the UN Population Fund). (The release coincided with the annual meeting of the Commission on Population and Development so we reached visiting country delegations, as well as year-round diplomats.) CGD’s past reports to agencies undergoing leadership changes (to UNAIDS, the World Bank, Global Fund, and others) have been received enthusiastically both for their technical advice, as well as their political value in stimulating a focus on reform. Mostly, I hoped the transplantation of good discussion about important policy issues would take hold.We had a great line-up starting with Professor David Bloom of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of my co-chairs on the CGD working group that looked at UNFPA on the occasion of its recent leadership transition. David presented our motivation for the report and the working group recommendations.  My other co-chair, Dr. Jotham Musinguzi, who heads the Africa regional office of Partners in Population and Development, then talked about the way UNFPA operates in countries. After all, the vast majority of its resources are in country offices, so that’s the true test of its effectiveness. Panelists Jill Sheffield, president of Women Deliver, and Jonna Jeurlink from the DFID mission to the UN talked about their perceptions of UNFPA as a partner and as a recipient of funds, respectively.I gave a few opening thoughts about what makes the development context interesting and challenging these days, and how that is relevant to UNFPA. The current financial climate has prompted a useful examination of how aid is working and what governance arrangements and technical modalities are best suited for the future. There are many new initiatives aimed at mobilizing resources, transforming advocacy, and aligning national strategies with international commitments. Most are also trying to increase harmonization, accountability, and transparency among donors and institutions.Conditions are in flux and the issues we raised in the report of governance, results, effectiveness and communication are timely, offering a unique opportunity to examine how UNFPA can best position itself and its objectives to be effective. Its small size and voluntary resource base can be an advantage if it can be nimble, laser-focused, while consolidating gains and emphasizing common ground. But this new context raises many questions as well.The working group’s four recommendations for action pose and strive to answer various questions to help UNFPA make tough choices. Can UNFPA to stick to the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action and also work on sexuality? How can they put youth in the forefront and also deal with rapidly aging populations? And how should UNFPA link to the Global Strategy for Women and Children and to UN Women, while not being redundant?Granted, UNFPA lives in a particularly more polarizing and politicized space than almost any other UN or multilateral agency, as we’ve observed recently in Washington. Although recent congressional attempts to completely defund UNFPA failed, its funding for the current year was cut by $15 million. Yet, those financial and political challenges will not disappear. The reproductive health and family planning community should embrace and study the assessments now available on the global stage, including the CGD report and the DFID findings, and use them to show friends and foes alike UNFPA’s essential role in a new era.Over the course of working on this project for the past year, we heard from many people in many places. We heard strong and articulate views about what UNFPA is and should be, some of them very extreme (I’ll leave those to your imagination). I was particularly surprised by the disparity in views, both about what UNFPA is, and what it should be. This implies that UNFPA’s vision may have become somewhat blurred, and needs to be focused. That is the Working Group’s first recommendation.We met a few weeks ago with UNFPA’s new executive director, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, and his senior staff to share the recommendations and discuss the way forward. Dr. Osotimehin is currently gathering input from inside and outside of UNFPA and will present his plans for the Fund to UNFPA’s Executive Board this fall.  We received some assurances that the working group’s recommendations would be part of their on-going strategic planning.The next few months are a crucial time for all who wish to see UNFPA move into its fourth decade as a stronger and more effective organization. We encouraged those who gathered in New York to keep up the pressure on UNFPA to not boycott the discussion. The member states – especially Executive Board members and those diplomats and country delegations closely involved in population, reproductive health, and family planning issues – along with key civil society organizations, should study what is in the report, consider what it says and who said it, and then decide how to act to help UNFPA achieve the shared goals of greater effectiveness and alacrity in improving women’s health and well-being.