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In Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Delivery as One agenda has taken shape within the Joint UN Country Strategy. The country strategy makes it much easier for the government and the donors to see what the UN is actually doing in PNG, both from a programme and an operational angle. It’s an “All
In Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Delivery as One agenda has taken shape within the Joint UN Country Strategy. The country strategy makes it much easier for the government and the donors to see what the UN is actually doing in PNG, both from a programme and an operational angle. It’s an “All in One Strategy Guide to the UN in PNG”. The UN country strategy has five elements generally referred as the “Five Ones”:
The good thing about this framework is that it has allowed professionalization in the way the UN does business: each of these ‘Ones’ has its own clearly identified and measurable
results and resources. Everyone is involved in what we are trying to achieve over this five year period. This alone has en-sured more effective management of our programmes and operations. The fact that we have one report to provide to government and donors rather than 14 individual reports, further contributes to simplification. Due to of these advantages, we have generated critical buy-in and support from both the government and development partners.
Of the “Ones”, the best known are the ‘One Programme’ and the ‘One Fund’. The ‘One Fund’ is a critical component creating a single financing mechanism for all our program-matic priorities. Both have received strong support from government and donors, as they cut their transaction costs in working with the UN, and create a transparent and coor-dinated environment for everyone to work within. The PNG One Fund will likely channel up to 80 percent of the UNs development resources through this single mechanism. That’s a tremend-ous step towards harmonization and simplification as there were previously more than 30 different channels through which the UNCT received funding.
One of the great things that changed the way the UN works in PNG, whether programmes or operations, is the concept of our Task Teams, which are pools of staff from different UN Organizations with a similar knowledge and experience base. The Task Teams are responsible for the planning and reali-zation of the results in our Joint UN Country Strategy, whether they are programme, operational or communication results. In order to plan together, teams need to listen, discuss and agree on common results and how each UN Organization will contribute to support the national development priorities. But it is an awareness process as well, and it forces alignment between our different programmes. In the end, we all contribute to the same goal - each agency in its own way.
Each Task Team contributes to the implementation of the annual work by overseeing one or more interme-diate outcomes of the UN Country Programme (UNCP) Action Plan such as Parliament and Legislative Processes,
MDGs and Aid Effectiveness, Provincial Planning and Man-agement, Human Rights, Nation Building, Disaster Man-agement, Health, Education, Child Protection, Sustainable Livelihoods, Population, Gender and HIV/AIDS.
Facilitating change is another key component of the ‘Delivery as One’ agenda in PNG. In 2010 the capacity of the UN in PNG will be assessed taking into account how government, UN partners and UN staff perceive the UN, what we do and how we do it - particularly our capacity to deliver against planned results.
Of course there are challenges with the ‘All in One” strategy and UN integration. The main challenge is change - both for the UN System and our counterparts in government and development partners. Everyone needs to think differently - letting go of their agency mentality to allow for a deeper un-derstanding of each sister agency’s interests and goals. The Task Team structure has also facilitated change. Additionally, as a result of the change process, staff report to their Head of Agency and to the Task Team leader, in that order.
People now need to use the new integrated system, and not hang on to the agency based system. If we hang on to our agency based system, you end up increasingly doing double work as the new integrated system still will require us to do things the new way. And talking about double work – until HQ allows us to use the single report as our main reporting tool, we continue doing double reporting, which is a lot of extra work.
Whether the new Delivering as One approach will work, depends upon the people involved. If you have a good Resi-dent Coordinator, a strong UN Country Team - good staff and good management - change becomes much easier.
In PNG we have improved our collaboration to the vision of our senior management, the support of government and our partners as well as the determination of our staff. We are more aware of our sister agencies, what they do and we use this awareness to enhance our planning, monitoring, implementation and reporting processes, while reducing our transaction costs for government and our partners.
As a result of the UN improved coordination, it makes it easier for us to engage with other partners and the govern-ment, while contributing to a more effective aid environment. We expect that next year’s Mid-Term Review will demonstrate that our contributions increased development results in PNG. Let’s hope it does…..
Prepared by the PNG UNCT