Devex Newswire: Can the UN fill the governance vacuum in Gaza?

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees has taken some heat over the decades for its work in Gaza. We explain how the current crisis puts it back in the hot seat as critics seek to eliminate it. Also in today’s edition: the United Kingdom government’s money-saving ideas could send Afghan refugees back to the Taliban, how ChatGPT can help SDGs, and MCC gets a reprieve. A ‘new reality’ in Gaza? UNRWA has been a controversial political lightning rod for decades. Lauded by many for providing urgent lifesaving help to Palestinians, the U.N. agency is slated by some as an unwitting pawn for Hamas. The worst terror attack against Israeli civilians in a generation has provided a chance for conservative Israeli and U.S. politicians to step up calls to defund the massive relief agency that provides aid to more than 1 million Palestinians currently displaced in the Gaza Strip, writes Devex Senior Global Reporter Colum Lynch. “There will be a new reality in Gaza,” Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations says, proposing the relief agency be replaced by another U.N. entity without the agency’s history and political baggage. Republican presidential candidates have also weighed in. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., want humanitarian aid to Gaza severed. “The UN Relief & Works Agency is a corrupt organization that fuels hate against Israel,” Haley fumed on X, formerly Twitter. “No more money to countries and orgs that hate America and our allies.” But forecasts of UNRWA’s demise may be premature, writes Colum. For moderates, the relief agency provides some semblance of stability in basic services for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and across the Middle East. Some of the $100 million that U.S. President Joe Biden earmarked for humanitarian assistance in Gaza will go to UNRWA, which employs more than 13,000 Palestinians in the territory, and Washington has quietly prodded donors to increase funding. Meanwhile, Biden recently pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to immediately and significantly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to meet the needs of civilians in Gaza,” according to a White House statement. “No one thinks UNRWA can be replaced,” one U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, tells Devex. “The U.S. knows it is [an] essential actor now and the day after.” Read more: Besieged UN relief outfit plots future in Gaza’s hellscape ICYMI: How underfunded is UNRWA? Here’s what the data says (Pro) + Track the countries and organizations that have given aid to Gaza and the West Bank amid the ongoing war. Sunak’s cost cuts bring hell to Afghan refugees Some 3,250 Afghan refugees who fled Taliban rule have been trapped in Pakistan, after an instruction from U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to cut the costs of Afghan refugees in the United Kingdom. They are now at risk of being deported back to Afghanistan — starting today. The government had accepted the Afghans had the right to sanctuary in the U.K. — only reasonable considering they put their lives on the line for the invading U.S.-led coalition which helped defeat the Taliban in 2001. But Sunak imposed a new rule that stopped flights relocating eligible refugees from Pakistan. The restriction — which has now been lifted — required them to arrange their own accommodation in the U.K. from Pakistan, more than 3,800 miles away. Islamabad has said it will begin deporting undocumented migrants today. So Sunak’s government is now scrambling to act before they are shipped back off to Afghanistan, writes our U.K. Correspondent Rob Merrick. Meanwhile, the U.N.’s refugee agency has warned that these Afghans face “imminent risk of persecution” if forced to return. At least one flight has left for London, carrying 132 of the 3,250 Afghans — just a fraction of an estimated 600,000 who have fled to Pakistan since the Taliban returned to power over two years ago. “It’s deeply troubling that Rishi Sunak has tried every trick in the book to wriggle out of his commitments to these brave men and women, and that it has taken the Pakistan government playing hardball to force him to meet his basic obligations,” Stephen Kinnock, Labour's shadow immigration minister, tells Rob. Read: How UK PM’s order to 'save money’ trapped thousands of Afghan refugees A consequential lapse? Back in August we told you how the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s board risked not being legally allowed to make decisions without action from the U.S. Congress. The agency’s board is required to have at least one private sector board member to approve new countries or address any challenges with existing large-scale grants. Of its four private sector board members only one remains — Ander Crenshaw — and his term was set to expire at the end of September. MCC managed to get a reprieve, allowing it to continue full operations when Congress passed a temporary budget extension that same month. It was an unusual move, as lawmakers typically dislike adding additional provisions to these short-term budget bills, writes Senior Reporter Adva Saldinger. The continuing budget resolution allows Crenshaw to continue in his position either through the end of March or until a new board member is appointed. There has been some movement on that front, too. Biden nominated Stuart Levey, chief legal officer and executive vice president of Oracle Corporation, as MCC board member. He’s in addition to Steven Swig, nominated in May. He is yet to be approved. Traditionally, those private sector board members are approved by the U.S. Senate in pairs — with one nominated by Republicans and one by Democrats — so this latest nomination could pave the way for action to avoid what was described to Adva as a “potentially very consequential” lapse. ICYMI: New MCC operations could grind to a halt without congressional action ChatGPT development Let’s face it, the world is unlikely to meet the Sustainable Development Goals in seven years. But even so, monitoring and evaluation — making sure we know what works and what doesn’t — must be all hands on deck, writes our Jessica Abrahams. That’s not an easy feat. So let’s see what ChatGPT can do. It’s early days, but lessons on how AI-powered tools could be used for evaluation, for example, are starting to emerge. With a growing focus on impact, “we need to start being more flexible and perhaps start using some of the innovative technologies that are out there,” explains Carmen Nonay from the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group. So far it has had mixed results. Its forays into text classification and image segmentation were unsuccessful, but there was more success with evaluating the World Bank’s economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. UNICEF has also used ChatGPT to comb through long documents. “We have quite literally thousands of evaluations within UNICEF that have been done over the years,” the U.N. agency’s director of evaluations, Robert McCouch, tells Jessica. “Back in the day … we would pump everything through Nvivo and do content analysis that way. Even that is too time consuming now for us.” Meanwhile, Action Against Hunger USA’s evaluation team has mainly used ChatGPT in “ideation processes” for developing theories of change, interventions, and projects, according to Apollo Nkwake, senior technical advisor for monitoring, evaluation and learning. “I think there’s a lot of untapped potential,” he says. Check out their Devex Pro panel discussion on the current opportunities and challenges in the world of monitoring and evaluation. Watch: How evaluators are using AI to find out what works (Pro) + A Devex Pro membership lets you access all our exclusive reporting, digital events, and analysis. Not yet gone Pro? Start your 15-day free trial now. In other news Craig Mokhiber, director in the New York Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, has stepped down, citing the U.N.’s failure to act on the “genocide” of Palestinian civilians under Israel. [The Guardian] The U.S. has moved to expel the Central African Republic, Gabon, Niger, and Uganda from the U.S.-Africa trade deal over gross human rights violations and failure to progress toward democratic rule. [BBC] A U.N. human rights expert has expressed alarm over the spread of gang violence to previously peaceful areas in Haiti, where over 500,000 children have been cut off from accessing education due to increasing violence in the country. [ABC News] Sign up to Newswire for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development.