The United Nations Development Program, the U.N.'s anti-poverty agency, only has “remote connections with poverty” and does little to help the world's 1.3 billion poor, according to a report commissioned by the agency itself.
The report, scheduled for closed-door discussions at the end of this month, describes the UNDP as failing to follow up after helping poor countries,
Fox News reports.
After it has spent more than $8.5 billion between 2004 and 2011, the agency still can't prove if its activities have helped anyone.
The document blames much of the problem on how the UNDP spreads itself across a wide range of activities, from environmental projects to border management, taking away from its anti-poverty mission.
The UNDP's executive board ordered the evaluation in 2009, to be based on work in 2011 and 2012, and the agency's own Office of Evaluation, backed up independent experts and consultants, did the assessment and made the damaging report.
The whole document has not yet been made available for examination, but the 13 page summary reveals that the agency has several issues to face.
In addition to finding it does little to help poverty, the UNDP has trouble proving how much money it spends on anti-poverty efforts across a variety of programs that reaches across at least 162 countries in addition to its New York headquarters.
UNDP spends approximately $5 billion annually, according to U.N. figures, loosely related to anti-poverty issues, but many of the projects that are reported as contributing to poverty reduction don't actually do so.
The evaluators also found that even when innovative pilot projects are successful, the UNDP doesn't do enough to expand the efforts to help large numbers of people.
But by spreading its efforts away from poverty, the UNDP has had problems. For example, the agency has only had minor success in linking environmental programs to anti-poverty programs.
The agency also encourages democracy, but that does not always work to fight poverty.
The report wasn't all negative, though. It said the UNDP is able to have a “pragmatic and flexible approach” toward approaching the problem of poverty.
But on the whole, “UNDP “performs poorly in providing support to its national partners” to learn from their own anti-poverty efforts.
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