Delivering as One: Making the UN system more coherent, effective and efficient

The United Nations launched the “Delivering as One” pilot initiative in 2007 to respond to the challenges of a changing world and test how the UN family can provide development assistance in a more coordinated way in eight countries.

When the Secretary-General launched Delivering as One, the governments of eight countries—Albania, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Pakistan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uruguay, and Viet Nam—volunteered to become “Delivering as One” pilots. The pilot countries agreed to work with the UN system to capitalize on the strengths and comparative advantages of the different members of the UN family. Together they are experimenting with ways to increase the UN system’s impact through more coherent programmes, reduced transaction costs for governments, and lower overhead costs for the UN system.

The Four principles

The eight pilots are making reforms based on four principles:

• One Leader
• One Budget
• One Programme
• One Office

These changes respond to varied needs while drawing on all parts of the UN system, whether based in the country or not. The exercise has already helped to align our programmes and funding more closely to national priorities. It has strengthened government leadership and ownership. It’s ensuring that governments have access to the experience and expertise of a wider range of United Nations organizations to respond to their national priorities. Several issues we work on have seen increased emphasis, most notably being support to the productive sector, employment, trade, protection of the environment, adaptation to climate change, the global food crisis, and the financial crisis. This improvement has emerged from a process where UN agencies that aren’t physically present in the pilot countries have been able to spend more time advising their governments without having to set up costly offices.

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Background

The creation of the Delivering as One pilots was recommended by the Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence, a group of heads of state and policy makers tasked to examine ways to strengthen the UN’s ability to respond to the challenges of the 21st Century. (Watch the video of the launch here).

The Delivering as One pilot initiative builds on the existing reform agenda set by UN members states, which asks the UN development system to accelerate its efforts to increase coherence and effectiveness of its operations in the field through the establishment of Joint Offices. In response to the High-level Panel's Report and consistent with the work under the TCPR, the Secretary-General requested the Chair of the UNDG to move forward with the implementation of the Delivering as One pilots (the Secretary-General's letter).

Delivering as One has brought together partner countries, donors and UN country teams with fresh energy, momentum and a greater sense of common purpose. By strongly encouraging the eight pilot country teams to implement reforms and by giving them broad latitude to innovate and experiment with ways of working together as one UN team, Delivering as One has tested a number of different and ways of working together differently.

Delivering as One Resources

• Change Management
• Delivering as One Pilots
• Stocktaking Reports
• One Leader
• One Budget
• One Programme
• One Office
• Monitoring and Evaluation
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