Background
The UN's member states have called on the UN system to ensure that all UN agencies can provide their expertise and accumulated analytical and normative experience to support development at the country level. The General Assembly's 2004 and 2007 Triennial Comprehensive Policy Review resolutions specifically call for measures to ensure that non-resident agencies - those that have no representation or a limited presence in developing countries - can provide their services at the country level. In response, the UN Development Group established a Working Group on Non-Resident Agencies under its Programme Group. Following wide consultations and a survey of UNDG agencies and Resident Coordinators, as well as a discussion via the UNDG Coordination Practice Network, the Working Group prepared a report with specific recommendations. This was followed by an Implementation Plan that was endorsed by the UNDG Principals. The 2007 pilot phase of the Plan focuses on 14 pilot countries – the eight “Delivering as One” UN pilots and six 2007 CCA/UNDAF roll-out countries.

Context
The UN’s “Delivering as One” pilot initiative is testing in eight countries how the UN family can deliver development assistance that supports national priorities in a more coordinated way at the country level. In November 2007, the UNDG Chair initiated a stocktaking exercise to assess progress so far in the “Delivering as One” pilots. Following consultations among its member agencies, the Non-Resident Agency Task Team submitted inputs to the stocktaking. The inputs highlighted a number of common elements of importance to the non-resident agencies based on their involvement in and preliminary assessment of the “Delivering as One” pilots.

The UNDAF is the strategic programme framework for UN Country Teams. It describes the UN system's collective response to national development priorities. Its cycle, which increasingly is adapted to national programme cycles, is mostly harmonized with the programme cycles of UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and WFP. These four funds and programmes follow certain modalities and approval processes to prepare and harmonize their programme cycles. While this approach does not apply to many non-resident agencies, this should not be an impediment to their full engagement in the UNDAF. Their expected programme or project activities, technical assistance and budget contributions should be linked to the UNDAF results matrix as part of the UN system’s strategic response to national priorities. In this context, the six 2007 UNDAF roll-out countries were selected as the remaining subset of the NRA pilot countries.