Blurred Focus?

How well focused is UNICEF assistance?

Well, a country office focuses on 20 projects, on average.

According to the ProMS hub UNICEF supported, in 2004, about 2850 projects in about 140 countries and regional offices. The biggest contingent fell on India, with 171 projects. But India is an exception. The true behemoth is Uganda, which focused on 95 projects. Even before the Tsunami, the Sri Lanka office concentrated its resources on 80 projects, half of them from the private sector budget. Among all the great many things that one can do, the ESA Regional Office prioritized 55 projects.

I didn’t know we had a country programme in Malaysia, but ProMS discovered 14 projects there – Bangladesh has only 17. The Maldives and Djibouti also have 14 projects each, 2 more than Afghanistan. My favourite office is in Cuba. It only supports 5 projects.

There are also about 850 more support projects, financed from our support budget. Oddly enough, Togo has 19 support projects supporting 11 projects.

Of course projects mean different things for different people. But all projects come with a work plan that has to be annually negotiated and reviewed with our partners. How many work plans can one handle? Because of their insignificant results, many projects never show in annual reports. Many projects never take off. Others get cut by the Mid Term Review.

So, can we propose that each office preparing a new Country Programme will double its focus and reduce the number of projects by half? This would help to:

•  halve the administrative clutter
•  halve the annual planning and review work
•  double for each project the time available for field monitoring
•  halve the number and double the quality of each progress or annual report
•  double the resources for the better and promising projects
•  double management attention to key indicators for key results
•  halve the number of poor audit ratings related to lack of awareness of key indicators
•  generate time for better coordination with partners
•  double the proportion of projects that get evaluated, or double the quality of evaluations
•  save time to read the papers in advance of the PRSP meeting, and do that policy stuff
•  increase the likelihood of results that we can write home about

No doubt it would make us a more efficient, and a more strategic organization.

(20 January 2005)

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