EU Presidency Statement - Operational activities for development of the United Nations system

ECOSOC - Substantive Session - Operational activities of the United Nations for international development cooperation (Geneva: 3-28 July 2006)


Mr Chairperson,

I have the honour to speak on behalf of the European Union (EU).

The Acceding Countries Bulgaria and Romania, the Candidate Countries Turkey, Croatia* and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia , the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, as well as Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova align themselves with this declaration.


Mr Chairperson,

Let me start by expressing the EU's appreciation for the work of the United Nations Secretariat that they have done in preparing this meeting. The EU remains strongly committed to the implementation of the TCPR resolution in its entirety. The achievement of the MDGs depends to a great extent on the successful reform of the UN operational activities. We regard the TCPR resolution also as a tool in implementing the commitments made by our Heads of State and Government in the World Summit to make UN's country presence more effective, efficient, coherent, and better-performing. The TCPR should be a strong package to guide the UN system, and the UN country presence should support better outcomes for national development.

The reports before us today reflect that substantial progress has been made in the implementation of the TCPR resolution. The EU welcomes with appreciation the updated matrix, which is included in the report of the Secretary-General "Progress in the implementation of General Assembly resolution 59/250". The updated matrix provides us with valuable information on the efforts that the UN system has been carrying out in the course of last year to pursue the goals that were assigned to it in the TCPR resolution. We encourage the Secretariat to continue further refinement of the matrix, with the use of quantifiable targets, measurable benchmarks and well-defined time frames as well as inclusion of a longer-term planning perspective.

We also welcome the UNDG Executive committee report "Consolidated list of issues related to the coordination of the operational activities for Development, 2006".

However, the reports show also that more needs to be done in order to achieve significant increases in the effectiveness of UN's development activities at the country level and to build on recent progress on the one UN at country level as evidenced by work undertaken in pilots, Cape Verde and Vietnam.


Mr Chairperson,

Funding is a crucial part of the UN operational activities. As trends and perspectives in development funding were discussed in depth during the first day of the operational segment, this EU statement will focus on to the rest of the themes in the TCPR resolution that deserve our particular attention.

First some general comments and remarks.

National ownership and leadership are the prerequisites for sustainable development results. In this regard there has been good progress at the country level especially the introduction of poverty reduction strategies. Progress has already been made in aligning UN development plans - namely the CCA and UNDAF - with comprehensive national development strategies, in particular the PRS. Ownership of national governments in the planning of the CCAs and the UNDAFs is essential. It is also important to ensure the input of civil society and private sector, as full national ownership requires broad-based engagement and participation of all relevant stakeholders.We need to stress here the role of the UNDAF as the most effective form of country programming which covers all the UN's work. The UNDAF provides the strategic direction for the UN system, integrating all the programming and driving coherence.

The EU emphasizes the importance of UN agencies in harmonizing, aligning and coordinating their work as a means to increase the UN systems organizational efficiency and development impact and release valuable national resources to development work. In this respect we strongly welcome and support the efforts especially by UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and WFP to simplify and harmonize their rules and procedures. We also encourage specialized agencies to follow the simplification and harmonization agenda. In this context we note with pleasure the adoption of resolutions by the governing bodies of several specialised agencies, aligning their operational activities with the TCPR.

The EU would like to reiterate that gender-mainstreaming and women's empowerment need to be analysed and addressed in all of the operational activities by the UN. This also means that the commitment of the gender balancing the UN country teams should be implemented without delay. Furthermore, the EU sees that UNIFEM offers indispensable expertise that needs to be utilized better. We also want to emphasize the importance of generating sex-disaggregated statistics, gender specific information and analyses that are required to make gender inclusive policy decisions.

The transition from relief to development and its funding is still a challenge to the whole international community and especially to the UN. There is a need to better co-ordinate, collaborate and more efficiently support countries in transition from relief to development. We hope that the new Peace Building Commission and the new Peace Building Fund will gear UN's response to a new level in supporting post-conflict transitional efforts, through ensuring increased coherence with other agencies and actors involved in a post-conflict situation. The roles and responsibilities of actors in the UN as regards to transition from relief to recovery need to be further clarified.

The EU supports the strengthening of the Resident Coordinator system and sees that the Resident Coordinator should have the necessary levels of authority to take decisions and to provide leadership as well as the additional human and financial resources needed to enable the resident coordinator to carry out his/her coordinating functions in an efficient way. Resident coordinator should be considered as a neutral UN team-leader promoting system-wide culture among the staff at the country level. In this regard we welcome the new appraisal procedure for resident coordinators.

The evaluation and monitoring of the UN system's performance regarding its development effectiveness, results and responsiveness to national development challenges needs to be strengthened and further developed using harmonized standards. UN system should take more systematic advantage of "lessons-learned". System-wide monitoring and evaluation is of utmost importance. The EU strongly supports joint evaluations, which should, for example, diminish the reporting burden of the national authorities. Both quantitative and qualitative data needs to be collected and analysed and national data and expertise used.


Mr Chairperson,

The EU shares the SG's analyses and welcomes the recommendations made at the TCPR progress report (E/2006/58).

Capacity development in developing countries is at the very core of the development activities. We are interested to know how the UN is taking this important agenda forward throughout the development system, in particular concerning the sustainability of the UN capacity-building efforts. How could the UN use more systematically and effectively its full capacity to support the development efforts of the developing countries? We would like to know more about the ideas generated in the CEB Knowledge Management Task Force and get clarifications on how system-wide knowledge management would materialize? This also entails that the expertise and services of the specialized agencies should be better utilized and the EU encourages further development of mechanisms and new innovative ways to involve non-resident agencies at the country-level in operational activities.

We welcome UNDG the 2005 position paper of the UNDG on sector and budget support and look forward to the additional guidelines on this. We are also pleased to note that the number of joint programmes has been increasing rapidly, particularly as a response to the UNDG guideline note on Joint programming issued in 2004. We strongly promote further intensification of joint programming at the country and regional level. UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and WFP should lead the way and invite also specialized agencies to join this work moving towards a common programming cycle and increasing join programmes. Progress is also under way in coordinating operational activities during transition phase from relief to development as the OCHA and the UNDG member organizations are developing joint programmes. These are just few examples that already show us the reforms made by the UN development system are bearing fruit and we applaud UN system for this.

Looking into the next year and the comprehensive review of the resolution we hope that TCPR 2007 will create a framework that allows the UN operational activities to further upgrade their performance. We need to include more clearly the normative dimension and the idea of interlinking of development, human rights and security. We also need to find better ways to measure the development impact, to make the UN more capable to work in a new aid environment at the country -level, we need better funding mechanisms and modalities, more systematic UN system-wide lessons-learned practices, to harmonize different standards of the UN system, an to utilize experiences of the joint programming and joint country programmes to make UN a more relevant development partner.


Mr Chairperson,

The TCPR 2007 should give further impetus to the efforts made by the SG and the operational agencies. The preparations will be made in the context of the WSO follow-up including the biannual Development Cooperation Forum. The Paris Declaration on Aid effectiveness and its implementation in the framework of international aid architecture will also have impact on the preparations. Most importantly, we look with great interest of the outcome of the Secretary-General's high level panel on system-wide coherence. We hope it will give comprehensive and concrete analysis and recommendations for the UN operational activities.

The EU is confident that our debate and deliberations during this segment will provide guidance for the Secretary-General and we commit ourselves to be creative and constructive during the preparation process of the next TCPR.


I thank you Mr Chairperson.

| Arriba |

• EU Presidency Statement - Operational activities for development of the UN system (2/11/2006)
• EU Presidency Statement - ECOSOC High Level Segment (4/7/2006)
• EU - Speaking points: High-Level Policy Dialogue on current developments in the world economy and international economic cooperation (2/7/2006)