"Every day we are reminded of the need for a strengthened United Nations, as we face a growing array of new challenges, including humanitarian crises, human rights violations, armed conflicts and important health and environmental concerns. Seldom has the United Nations been called upon to do so much for so many. I am determined to breathe new life and inject renewed confidence into a strengthened United Nations firmly anchored in the twenty-first century, and which is effective, efficient, coherent and accountable."
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
A number of reform packages have been approved by the General Assembly. The most recent one, approved after the 2005 World Summit, aims to achieve greater coherence and efficacy at the country level. UNFPA is fully on board with this goal, and is committed to a more effective, efficient and relevant United Nations that ‘delivers as one’. UNFPA and its sister agencies in the field, which together comprise the UN Country Teams (UNCT), are instructed to collaborate on programmes and their implementation.
The collaboration starts with the preparation of Common Country Assessments, designed to pinpoint critical concerns and challenges facing programme countries. The CCA, in turn, serves as a stepping stone towards a common UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), which seeks to harmonize the programme cycles and activities of relevant UN agencies and maximize their effectiveness by focusing on the comparative advantages of each.
In Egypt, UNFPA is working towards the achievement of three out of the five UNDAF outputs and it is co-chairing the Outcome 3 task force.
Outcome 1: By 2011, state's performance and accountability in programming, implementing and coordinating actions, especially those that reduce exclusion, vulnerabilities and gender disparities, are improved.
Outcome 3: By 2011, regional human development disparities are reduced, including reducing the gender gap, and environmental sustainability improved.
Outcome 4: By 2011, women’s participation in the workforce, political sphere and in public life is increased and all their human rights are increasingly fulfilled.
‘Delivering as one’ is more than a slogan and is being materialized in different joint programmes. Indeed, joint programming captures much of what is the aim of the UN Reform – the UNCT working together with partners to: strengthen country analysis; align with national priorities; and respond to those priorities as one system. Joint programmes gather UN agencies, with national partners and donors, to realize clear gains in effectiveness and efficiency from combining their efforts and resources in a common work plan and budget.
The work plan and budget form part of a joint programme document, outlining details about roles and responsibilities of partners in coordinating and managing the joint activities. The joint programme document is signed by all participating organizations and national partners. Within the framework of the UNDAF outcomes that are relevant to UNFPA mandate, UNFPA-Egypt is involved in many of these joint programmes.