UN system staffing dropped 9% in 2025 (130,948 to 120,176), but the cuts are strategically blind. While following donor funding lines and contract types, the downsizing is disproportionately eliminating junior and early-career staff while preserving tenure-protected senior roles.
Key findings:
- Under-30s fell from 4% to <3% of staff; over-40s rose to 73%
- Staff with <10 years tenure shrinking; 10+ years growing
- Geographic imbalance worsening: UAE and Qatar (major donors) have 28 and 17 staff respectively; Germany and Canada maintain 1,800+ each
- China staff rose 33% (1,235 to 1,641) in seven years
Author proposes five fixes: mandatory workforce impact assessments before cuts, updated competency frameworks for policy roles (including non-management senior tracks), published nationality data with succession checkpoints, targeted Gulf/emerging-donor recruitment, and sunset clauses in country-office contracts.
Title: Is the UN Quietly Firing Its Future? What UN80 Means for the People Who Staff the UN
Bits, Bobs & Big Ideas #44
Publication: Substack - Tomorrow Is Possible
Date: August 3, 2026
Click here for the article
Title: Is the UN Quietly Firing Its Future? What UN80 Means for the People Who Staff the UN
Bits, Bobs & Big Ideas #44
Publication: Substack - Tomorrow Is Possible
Date: August 3, 2026
Click here for the article
Thanks for sharing this. Note XUNICEF published an article I wrote earlier this year on how JPOs were treated in UNICEF cuts-- in the form of an interview with a JPO. There is much more work to be done to better determine the profile of those most affected by cuts - it appears more young people were affected but numbers are needed to verify this. Having been a staff during the cuts - I can say the rhetoric back and forth was not healthy and younger staff appeared got be largely looked down upon for even questioning the cuts. What has not been measured at all is the massive downturn in productivity and motivation during the cuts. One can only imagine team productivity in all this uncertainty - not just during the cuts but in the period before and after the cuts as we saw real colleagues lives effected. It will be sometime before the smoke clears and we see more clearly.
ReplyDeleteNaturally, every contract termination is painful and creates strong emotions. Let us not forget a few basics.
ReplyDeleteWhen funding shrinks, staffing has to shrink as well. Otherwise, an ever-larger share of available resources is spent on maintaining the organization itself, leaving proportionally less to reach the people and countries it is meant to serve.
The expansion of the workforce was driven by an exceptional influx of funding. It should therefore come as no surprise that a return to more normal funding levels requires a corresponding adjustment.
Few would dispute that the UN suffers from excessive bureaucracy. In organizations such as UNICEF, most staff are engaged in administration, compliance, coordination, and resource management rather than providing technical expertise or direct support to developing countries.
A substantial share of routine clerical and administrative work can now be performed more efficiently, more consistently, and at lower cost through automation and AI.
That said, staff cuts without genuine structural reform are ultimately arbitrary. They reduce headcount without addressing why those positions existed in the first place.
If reform had truly been the objective, the first departures would have been at the top. The USGs, ASGs, and arguably a significant share of the D2s presided over years of organizational expansion of bureaucracy while failing to fundamentally reform, or even reimagine, the UN development system. The leaders who managed and increased the bureaucracy and the surplus of staff positions should not be insulated from the consequences of their decisions. They should be the first to leave.
I agree with Detlef. My bigger question is: as UNICEF budget went up - why was the knee jerk reaction for staff positions to balloon ? During the peak of ONE UN reform pilots we all held our noses as we saw more the innerworkings of the UN like UNDP where they would spend more than 50 or even more than 90% of a grant on themselves. UNICEF tried to be more level headed to keep staff costs down on proposals and the grants that came in. Then somewhere along the way we were asked to bury staff costs in proposals and be more bold - that could have led to so many posts on grants? And the bloating that needed to be cut once budgets dropped? Another worrying trend was the explosion in size of Regional Offices - and half of those regional posts being covered by grants. That tied up large funds in non--implementation costs - before the funds ever landed at country office. Cooler heads should have prevailed as the new funds poured in - to be more wise about increasing staff rather than increasing results - these are not one in the same.
Delete"When funding shrinks, staffing has to shrink as well." That may be correct, but it does not necessarily follow that when funding increases, staffing has to increase as well. That may be where the problem lies.
DeleteThank you Detlef and Rob! Important points. When I joined the UN in January 1980, most of the UNHCR, Unicef and WFP staff where in field positions, or positions that directly supported programme implementation, My guess would have been nearly 70 percent of the staff. By the turn of the millennium, the move accelerated towards support functions and when I retired 2012, probably 70 percent of the staff where in Human Resources, IT, security, training, audit, accounting, you name it. Field colleagues ended up being judged by paperwork, and not by what they achieved on the ground in some of the hardest to reach places of conflict, to name an example. An analysis of that switch over the decades could also help us learn not to repeat mistakes of the past. Scary the information that young colleagues are the first to go. The UN will become a giant elephant graveyard of the old, with no new young blood allowed to do field work that changes realities on the ground for refugees, internally displaced, children, families, those living with neurovariations. Nils
ReplyDeleteWhen I left last year - 49 % of all international posts were in either HQ or RO location--not at country level. This was just before the major cuts took place and re-organisation that was long overdue. But the cuts and reorganization largely protected older staff.
DeleteAnd thank you Lou for that summary, of course!
ReplyDeleteThanks much for valued feedback. Remember when I was seconded to the UN Secretariat during Kofi's first UN reform initiative, met major resistance in the area of inter-agency HR, a senior executive shared the wisdom that "the only way to make a serious impact in HR management is to cut the pocketbook.... everyone listens". Decades later.......
ReplyDeleteThanks Lou and thanks to all colleagues who enriched the issue with their valid viewpoints. Another sad point is that it takes at least ten years to build the “Homo Unicefus”! Trust the same applies to sister organisations. Separating them is an amputation!
ReplyDeleteUmberto Cancellieri
These reflections from former UNICEF colleagues are valuable, but they also amount to a candid admission of institutional failure.
ReplyDeleteWhen funding increased, staffing increased with it. Posts were created against temporary grants, and regional and headquarters structures expanded. Now that funding is declining, the organization is dismissing younger and less-protected staff while many of those who led and managed the expansion remain in place.
That is not reform. It is personal self-protection.
The best that can be said about these “confessions” is that they help explain what went wrong. The less charitable conclusion is that UNICEF’s performance has been disappointing. When an organization approaching its 80th anniversary must reach back some 40 years and point to its contribution to developing a hand pump, the TARA, as evidence of its capacity for innovation, something has gone wrong.
Reconstructing UNICEF’s annual expenditure since 1946 and adjusting it for US inflation produces a cumulative figure exceeding $250 billion in today’s money. What has UNICEF achieved with a quarter of a trillion dollars?
Listing activities is not an answer. Nor is counting children “reached,” vaccines procured, wells drilled, staff trained, meetings organized, reports published, or governments advised. UNICEF should identify lasting changes, establish how much of those changes can be attributed to its work, and compare the results with the full cost.
This matters because aid organizations often associate themselves with improvements in child survival, education and public health, even when those improvements resulted primarily from economic growth and scientific advances. When indicators improve, aid agencies are quick to claim the credit. When countries stagnate or fall further behind, the same agencies accept none of the responsibility.
Smallpox eradication illustrates the problem. It is frequently presented as one of the great successes of international aid. I was working in the Ethiopian–Somali border area when the final case was detected, and UNICEF was not involved. The campaign was led by WHO and implemented with scientific, logistical, and financial support from the United States and other countries.
Smallpox eradication was an extraordinary achievement. But it was a global public-health campaign, not proof that aid works. It benefited wealthy countries enormously. Once eradication had been achieved, they could stop vaccinating their own populations, saving billions of dollars. Eradication was not an act of generosity toward poor countries. It was an exceptionally profitable investment.
Aid has certainly saved lives in emergencies and helped finance vaccination, nutrition, water supply and disease control. The criticism should not be that aid has achieved nothing. It should be that the sustainable development results have been very poor in relation to the money spent.
After more than 60 years of substantial development assistance, most of the largest recipients have not caught up with the rest of the world. Some have fallen further behind. That does not prove that aid caused underdevelopment, although in some countries it may have contributed. At the very least, that makes it difficult to claim that development aid has been a success.
The present crisis offers UNICEF an opportunity. Real reform would begin at the top. It would remove unnecessary management layers, reduce headquarters and regional bureaucracies, shift authority and technical competence to country operations, and judge managers by measurable results rather than expenditure, reports and visibility.
If real reform does not happen, UNICEF will be smaller, but remain ineffective, and its general influence will gradually decline.
It seems malpractices were noted, but little was done about them. Why is that?
ReplyDeleteGiven that few of us could have left UNICEF and found another job with similar pay and benefits, it was human to not rock the boat. When this was combined with pressure from many donor governments—and consequently their representatives on UNICEF’s Executive Board—to disburse rapidly increasing aid budgets, prudence may have been set aside.
DeleteThe expanding budgets and recruitment of large numbers of new staff also provided an opportunity to implement diversity, equity and inclusion policies much more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. These policies were a priority for many of the donor governments increasing their contributions, and DEI may gradually have become an objective in itself.
It must also have been considerably easier to recruit staff for headquarters and regional-office positions, typically located in pleasant cities, than for postings in Juba, Gode or Soroti.
Many factors may therefore have conspired to bring UNICEF to where it is today. As we have seen, there was little overt internal opposition to what was happening. The same appears to have been true of the Executive Board and the donors.
There is plenty of blame to go around, and it is easy to pass the buck. But the buck has to stop somewhere—and ultimately it must stop with the Executive Director.
Related to DEI, the last few years I was with UNICEF one HR dashboard sought to measure how well each country office was DIVERSE among internationals covered all the "regions" of UNICEF - ie do we we have each region represented well in each office. Why the heck would that be imporant? Does a having a WASH officer from Egypt, Bangladesh, Chile from Canada and from Malawi make us better at WASH? Why would we measure this - and if we did find things skewed - what do we do about it?
DeleteIt might be worth reading FT's The Big Read. "The Impossible Job: Saving the United Nations"
ReplyDelete