United Nations’ Biggest Development And Aid Agencies Quietly Piled Up At Least $12.2 Billion

Four of the United Nations’ biggest development and aid agencies quietly piled up at least $12.2 billion in unspent cash by the end of 2009, according to a confidential draft report prepared for the government of Norway. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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The four agencies with bulging bank accounts are the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), World Food Program (WFP), UNICEF, and the U.N. Population Program (UNFPA). Taken together, their cash position was the equivalent of 84 percent of the money that the four agencies would pull in for all of 2009, according to the study, which was examined by Fox News.

“UNFPA, UNICEF, UNDP and WFP are building up considerable reserves and/or [are] unable to spend a growing share of resources,” the draft report declares.
It adds that “the buildup of reserves implies that substantial donor funding is not being used for development purposes,” and warns that “it may also result in a situation where donors may not fund the U.N. system as much as before, until these reserves are utilized and brought down to an appropriate level.”
The report offers no similar opinion on a fifth agency included in the study, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which now refers to itself on its website as “the U.N. Refugee Agency.”
According to the Norwegian study, UNDP had $5 billion of unspent funds at the end of 2009.
According to the UNDP spokesman, the agency’s “balance of resources” at the end of 2010 was $4.8 billion, all of it “earmarked for specific programmatic activities to be undertaken in 2011 and beyond.”
The other agencies mentioned had cash positions of lesser amounts. At WFP, for example, the unspent funds “exceeded $4 billion” at the end of 2009. According to a WFP spokesman, the exact total was $4.0581 billion in 2009 and $4.0941 billion in 2010. For UNICEF, the tally at the end of its 2008-2009 fiscal year was $2.7 billion, and the 2010 year-end total was $2.2 billion. For the much smaller UNFPA, the tally of reserves and unspent funds was $500 million, according to the report, and $484.3 million in 2010.
None of the agencies analyzed in the Norwegian study would comment on the document when queried by Fox News, on the grounds that the document was still in draft form.
All of the agencies, however, objected to the notion that the unspent money in their treasuries was a reserve, in the sense of free cash that could be used for any purpose. All four said instead that the money represented funds for the future years of programs that had already been approved.
“These funds are committed, they are not fungible and do not represent an accumulated reserve,” underlined a spokesman for the United Nations Development Program, the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty agency. (Budgets for all of the organizations for 2012 are still in various stages of preparation.)
The two-volume study, prepared for Norway last month by the private consulting firm IDC, has the intimidating title of “Activity Based Financial Flows in U.N. system: a Study of Select U.N. Organizations.” Its intention, the report says, is not to produce an overall evaluation of U.N. aid, but instead to “contribute to the understanding of financing flows and current financial planning and budgeting processes,” at the selected U.N. agencies, including “how are resources allocated” and “where does the money go.”
Those questions are a matter of increasing concern “partly in response to the need to accelerate growth and poverty reduction and partly in response to demands from governments facing fiscal constraints and taxpayers,” the study says.
Norway’s is hardly the only government concerned with the way the U.N. gathers and spends funds, and how well it uses the proceeds. In March, a hard-nosed British government study threatened to pull the financial plug on four relatively minor U.N. agencies for their lack of effectiveness, even as it gave good marks to most of the agencies mentioned in the more recent Norwegian study.
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