Instead, I am suggesting a quick win for UNICEF, that neither requires any negotiations with gun toting militias, nor has to wait for a consensus coming out of the leadership meeting in March.
The publicly accessible UNICEF Transparency and Accountability Portal, which I heartily recommend to anyone, shows UNICEF expenditure of 575 million Dollar for Afghanistan, in 2022. The budget allocation was 3 Dollar, which is fair enough as we all know what is going on with the Taliban, and so on and so forth.
The money was spent in 44 Results Areas. I assume they must have to do with UNICEF’s Strategic Plan, which very strategically focuses on 54 outcomes and 174 outputs from which country offices may choose as many as they like. Perhaps there were 44 staff members who all needed a budget which they could administer.
The more than half a billion Dollars were expended according to outputs typically worth 20 to 50 million Dollar each. The largest output was for something health-related, where 115 million Dollar were expended. Another 43 million Dollar were spent on what is described verbatim as follows:
- Effective coordination for a timely humanitarian Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) response at national and sub-national levels, and emergency services are delivered, in line with the CCCs., which contributes to Climate Change, Disaster Risks And Envionmental Degradation, Safe And Equitable Water, Sanitation And Hygiene Services And Practices, Safe And Equitable Water, Sanitation And Hygiene Services And Practices (Covid), Sanitation, Water, Sanitation And Hygiene Systems And Empowerment Of Communities, Water, Sanitation And Hygiene Systems And Empowerment Of Communities (Covid). UNICEF aims to achieve this through Systems Strengthening And Institution Building, Systems Strengthening To Leave No One Behind. This contributes to the following Country Programme result: WATER, SANITATION & HYGIENE- Improved and equitable use of safe drinking water, sanitation, and healthy environments and improved hygiene practices in deprived provinces and vulnerable areas.
I can only assume that this hogwash was concocted by some pre-historic artificial intelligence; perhaps a more advanced variant of such intelligence can explain what actually happened.
In the online Transparency Portal, virtually all output and outcome statements for all UNICEF country offices read similarly; this is not an Afghan but a universal problem. Afghanistan just happens to be the country with both the smallest UNICEF budget and the largest expenditure, in 2022.
The Transparency Portal has been online for several years. In spite of its potential, its present form reflects an organizational ineptitude to design meaningful management systems and to explain to the rest of the world what UNICEF is actually doing. UNICEF has 15,000 staff members, but nobody seems to know what humbug shows up on UNICEF's own website, and nobody seems to care.
Most likely, the transparency problem could be easily fixed by a computer whizz, of which UNICEF has many very good ones. Money is not the problem. Let this repair cost 150,000 USD or more. This is less than one hundredth of one per cent of the (click) 1.5 billion USD surplus that UNICEF made in 2021, and which is parked in some investment account, together with the surplusses of previous years. Fixing the public view of its expenditure would be a good investment for UNICEF.
Alternatively, UNICEF could simply take the transparency site off the internet. I personally would regret it, as presumably would be the staff working on it, because they no longer would be able to feed their families. More importantly, it would make the organization even less transparent, which is something that UNICEF can ill afford.
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Wow, that is an incredible gobbledygook narrative in the name of "Transparency and Accountability" as if an allocation of $3 and expenditure of $575,000,000 were not intriguing enough.
ReplyDeleteHope someone at UNICEF reads your write-up and redesigns this portal -- for the sake of real transparency and accountability!
This is more than amazing (not in a good way) and terribly confusing for me. My head is spinning right now,allocation of$3 and expenditure of 575,000,000??? How does that even work? Taliban magic??? Yes, please, I agree, someone explain soon.
ReplyDeleteConfused Gulbadan