Henrietta Fore: High-Priority Issues

Dear Colleagues,

In early January, the Senior Leadership team and I held a planning meeting on a number of high-priority issues relating to our organization’s strategic agenda. As we continue our vital work to support children and young people in a changing world, I am sharing below the key takeaways from our discussions. Most of these takeaways will be referenced in some manner during the upcoming Global Management Team meeting on February 4^th.

Last year, we set five key priorities: better integrating long-term development into our humanitarian work; expanding our efforts to deliver community-based primary health care; gathering the world around new efforts to support young people; pursuing innovation across our work; and building new partnerships with the private sector.

As we continue these efforts, we must also ensure UNICEF is well-positioned to respond to global phenomena that are having a direct impact on children’s lives, like climate change, urbanization and enduring conflicts.

Against this backdrop of opportunity and challenge, our meeting’s agenda was focused on how we can better position ourselves as an organization.

The meeting was divided into four components: management, key accelerators, resource mobilization and our communications strategy:

Management

• We agreed that supporting our country operations must continue to be a top priority in all management decisions.

• We agreed to continue streamlining our processes across the organization to reduce paperwork, save staff members’ time and increase efficiencies.

• Since almost half of our programme expenditure is for humanitarian emergencies, we committed to finding ways to broaden ownership of humanitarian work across the whole organization so we are well-positioned to support our extensive humanitarian and emergency portfolios. 

• We committed to increasing career-growth opportunities for all categories of staff.

• Following their reports on Research and the Cause Framework, the team working on the re-positioning exercise is currently reviewing UNICEF’s corporate planning, monitoring and reporting functions and will share their recommendations in the near future.  We will continue keeping staff fully updated on the exercise. 

• We committed to immediately formalize 360-degree assessments for all Senior Staff Rotation (SSR) staff.

• We committed to introducing purposeful matrix management throughout the organization, in a measured and thoughtful way.

• We re-committed to our work to prevent workplace abuse and harassment and to regularly communicate with staff on this important issue. In particular, we agreed to find new ways to reduce the turnaround time on the investigations process. 

• We re-emphasized our commitment to a “speak-up” culture at every level of our organization and in all situations — whether in reporting wrongdoing, or in meetings.

• We agreed to commission a culture-change management consultancy to accelerate the required changes recommended by independent reviews.

Key accelerators

The core business of UNICEF remains our programming for children and young people across all sectors as per our 2018-2021 Strategic Plan (SP) and in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In line with the change strategies identified in our SP to accelerate results across programmes for children and young people, in 2019, we will:

·                     Develop a new, organization-wide vision and strategy on innovation that responds to the world around us and accelerates results for children and young people across all sectors;

·                     Launch Gen-U with the African Union and in India and Bangladesh, and host a series of Gen-U Solutions Summits with our public and private partners, and our sister UN agencies;

Collaborate more extensively with our sister UN agencies on key common programme enablers like cash transfers;

·                     Scale-up partnerships on Strategic Plan Goal Area 1 — “Every Child Survives and Thrives” — including primary and community health care;  and

·                     Expand our work to end sexual abuse and exploitation

Throughout, we underscored the importance of working on these accelerators with our partners around the world, including governments, businesses, NGOs and our UN partners. This will include secondments to our organization from businesses and partners, and continuing our work to establish a global development commons to bring together the ideas, experience and unique vision of a broad range of people on children’s issues.

Resource mobilization

We examined recent trends and Strategic Plan projections on both the public and private fundraising sides. In particular, we noted the flat projections in the current Strategic Plan on the public side, and the growth of close to 50 per cent projected for the private sector side.

• We agreed that reaching our fundraising targets is a top priority — especially private-sector fundraising — to achieve our revenue and regular resources targets.

• We committed to putting in place the management structures needed to deliver on these targets — including through the pursuit of more shared-value partnerships. 

• We agreed that the Partnerships teams, in conjunction with DFAM, will, through the recently established senior-level meeting, accelerate their mid-year review of the public and private revenue forecasts in the Strategic Plan to determine any necessary adjustments in our various fundraising efforts. The reviews will take place on a quarterly basis.

• We committed to further pursue Innovative Financing that can unlock new resources - most of which is performance-based.

Communications strategy

In support of all the above, we will pursue the implementation of UNICEF’s communications and advocacy strategy in order to present UNICEF as a key source of information on children’s issues.

We recognized the need to strengthen our internal communications and, after appropriate consultations, an internal communications strategy will be in place by June 2019.

We hope this note will give you a sense of our strategic direction for 2019.  You will also receive in the coming days updates on other key priority areas and issues that we discussed at this session.

I would like to extend my thanks to UNICEF staff around the world for your continued commitment and efforts in support of children and young people.

Best regards,

Henrietta H. Fore