United Nations

Office of the UN Resident Coordinator – MALAWI
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‘Delivering as One’

Michael Keating - UN Resident Coordinator

LILONGWE, 19th December 2007 –An interview with the United Nations Resident Coordinator, Michael Keating

One UN in Malawi: Of what benefit is it?
Recently, United Nations’ agencies announced in Lilongwe that they were harmonizing their operations and would start working under one roof. BENSON LINJE caught up with UN Resident Representative in Malawi Michael Keating to explain what One UN really means and how the Government of Malawi was going to benefit from the arrangement. Excerpts:

What does harmonization of UN operations mean?
In a nutshell, instead of government and civil society having to deal with three, four, five, seven, eight different agencies on one subject it will be able to deal through one entry point with a number of different agencies. It’s essentially a shift from an approach based on institutions to an approach based upon achieving development results.

Where does this concept of One UN, ‘Delivering as One’, emanate from?
Well, I think it goes beyond the UN and I have to explain the origin in the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that Malawi is fairly dependent upon aid for achievement of its development objectives. Depending on how you measure it, something like 40 percent of the budget comes from aid partners and these aid partners each have their own priorities, their own offices, their own ways of working, their own accountability systems etc. And this represents and enormous burden to the Government of Malawi, having to deal with so many different actors, each with its own requirements, its financial regulation, with its own procurement systems and so on. So the basic idea of alignment and harmonization is to say, look we as development partners all agree that we are going to use national priorities, national systems, national reporting requirements, national monitoring and evaluation systems instead of all using our own, and thereby cut down the burden upon government of dealing with so many different partners. And this idea has been captured in something called Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the Paris Declaration is really a global deal. It’s a deal between the countries that are providing the aid and organisations that are providing aid on one side, and developing countries on  the other. And the aid providers are saying: OK we’ll simplify our procedures, we’ll work together to make life much easier for the recipient government in many different ways on the understanding that recipient government will have clear Millennium Development Goals-based development plans that they are politically accountable, that they have monitoring and evaluation procurement systems to which we can subscribe, and thereby reducing the complexity of providing aid.

After that signing ceremony we witnessed at the Capital Hill, how are you going to move forward in terms of implementation?
Well, what I was going to say is, in the UN, there are about 15 UN agencies active in Malawi of which half of these have representative offices and others just have activities. What you are going to see is all the UN agencies working together around the achievement of specific development goals, goals which the UN has not invented but which can be found in the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy. So, instead of the UN coming along and saying this agency wants to do this and that agency wants to do that, the other agency wants to do something else, each agency has taken its objectives from a national plan and agreed to organize its resources and people to work with government around the achievement of objectives in the national plan. And this is very different to the situation say 10 or 20 years ago where people were just doing their own thing.

On implementation of this arrangement again, it says all UN agencies will be housed under one roof and there are fears that many people will lose their jobs. What is you comment on this?
There are two broad aspects to what we are calling ‘Delivering As One.’ One is the programmatic. Looking at the limited number of programmes determined by government around which we will work. And the second is the operational or administrative support aspect which is all those things we need to do to support our programmatic work And this include everything from finance to operational support, fleet management, lCT, procurement, etc.
Now what I envisage if things go as well as we plan is that the programmatic side may increase whereas as we move to common premises, which is what we are going to do thanks to the support of the government which has allocated a plot of land on which the UN system can build, we will reduce the need for so many operational support staff. And so I think in the long term, yes there may be a reduction in the number of operational support staff. But I will make a couple of points here:
First of all, this is going to take several years—three, four or even five years to implement. You know, you’ve got to build first; you got to re-locate.
Secondly, it will be a managed process whereby, you know, people who are actually leaving the UN, not necessarily replaced, people will be receiving training for different kinds of job opportunities. But I don’t see it as a dramatic reduction anyway.

Where else is the UN delivering as one?
I would say probably in at least 20 or 30 other countries if not more, governments are supporting the UN to deliver as one. Having said that, there are eight pilot countries four of which are in Africa. Those four countries in Africa are Cape Verde, Tanzania, Mozambique and Rwanda where government and UN is working very closely together to ensure that the UN is supporting the government to deliver on the national development plan, to strengthen government coordination capacity and to strengthen management and monitoring and evaluation capacity.

Any last word to government or to the people of Malawi?
Yes, I would say that the UN is different to other development partners, not least because Malawi is a member of the UN, Malawi is not a member of many donor countries, it is a member of the UN. And therefore delivery as one is in the interest of the Government of Malawi, a challenge that we need to face together is how to strengthen coordination within government, not just within the UN so that the government can take advantage of the Paris Declaration. And of course the UN wants to help the government do that, whether it’s in the area of health or in the area of agriculture or education or water and sanitation; priority areas if Malawi is to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

For more information, contact:
Ms. Pilirani Semu-Banda, Communications Officer, UNFPA Malawi
(pilirani@unfpa.unvh.mw), +265 1 771 444/474.