Billions wasted by UN 'anti-poverty' agency UNDP, internal report shows no evidence it improved the world's poor

1/16/13, "$5.7 Billion UN Anti-Poverty Agency's Actions Do Little to Reduce Poverty," Breitbart, AWR Hawkins

"Although the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) ostensibly exists to reduce poverty around the world, a recent UNDP internal document reveals that the agency has "only remote connections with poverty."
 
Moreover, the document says that even where the agency does act to reduce poverty, the actions are frequently "disconnected" from any kind of overarching plan.
 
Because of this, even when UNDP projects were done with the right kind of planning in mind, assessments of whether the projects actually reduced poverty were "often unclear."
UNDP spent $8.5 billion on poverty reduction between the years 2004 and 2011, yet the agency readily admits it's difficult to "demonstrate" any "significant change

in the lives of the people it [tried] to help."

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1/14/13, “UN’s $5.7B anti-poverty agency doesn’t do much to reduce poverty, according to its own assessment,” George Russell, Editor at Large, Fox News

“The $5.7 billion United Nations Development Program bills itself as the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty agency, but when it comes to actually helping the world’s 1.3 billion desperately poor people, that description appears to be more of a facade, according to a report commissioned by UNDP itself that is slated for closed-door discussion at the end of this month.

According to the document, UNDP’s efforts often have “only remote connections with poverty.” Its anti-poverty programs are “disconnected,” and are frequently “seriously compromised” by a lack of follow-up to help poor countries learn “what works and why.”

Bottom line: after spending more than $8.5 billion on anti-poverty activities between 2004 and 2011—and just how much more is something of a mystery– UNDP has only “limited ability…to demonstrate whether its poverty reduction activities have contributed to any significant change in the lives of the people it is trying to help.”

Those devastating conclusions come in a densely worded, official “evaluation of UNDP contribution to poverty reduction,” which will be presented to the agency’s 36-nation supervisory board at its next meeting, which begins on January 28 in New York....

Moreover, it lays a significant part of the blame for that failing on the way that UNDP has spread itself across a growing range of activities in the name of promoting “development” –from environmental projects to trade promotion and border management—

that “dilute” its anti-poverty effort."...






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