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We have the lowdown on what’s up at the United Nations.
Also in today’s edition: We check in on two U.S. agencies that have so far survived the Trumpian storm.
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Belgian boss
The U.N. Development Programme has a tall task: keep development on the front burner, while many countries, such as the United States, relegate it to the back burner. And it just picked Alexander De Croo, the former Belgian prime minister, to shepherd it through these trying times.
De Croo — another European national installed at the helm of the U.N.’s premier development agency — beat out several candidates for the job, including Izumi Nakamitsu, a veteran U.N. official from Japan; Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, a Greek-French gynecologist who served as minister of state for development, francophonie, and international partnerships; Mohamed Nasheed, a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and the first democratically elected president of the Maldives; and a former U.N. special adviser on reform, Jens Christian Wandel of Denmark.
His appointment comes at a time when the U.N. is facing a painful financial crunch, as the U.S. and other traditional donors from Europe slash foreign assistance budgets, my colleague Colum Lynch writes. The U.N. campaign to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 has also seen serious setbacks in recent years. Only 35% of the 17 SDGs are on track, and 18% of the goals have gone backward since 2015, the year they were set.
Read: UN picks former Belgian prime minister to lead UNDP
Illusionary power
You would think the leader of the United Nations, which represents 193 member states, is the global embodiment of all-mighty power. The secular pope, as Colum describes it. But how much influence does U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres really wield? Less than you think — a weakness laid bare by Guterres’ bold plans for U.N. reform, which have earned a collective shrug among some agencies.
That’s because the U.N., for all its efforts to project a unified front, is largely a sprawling semiautonomous federal system, with many of its agencies answering to their own executive boards, donors, and beneficiaries, writes Colum, who has a detailed breakdown of the byzantine machinations at Turtle Bay, the New York neighborhood that’s home to the U.N. headquarters.
The U.N. Charter does grant the secretary-general powers to administer the work of the U.N. Secretariat, which consists of some 33,000 international civil servants, but that’s a mere fraction of the 130,000-plus employees within the broader U.N. system.
That’s not to say Guterres is completely helpless. His bureaucratic privileges range from firing employees to turning down the air conditioning to save money. But if you want to bury a program or department that has outlived its usefulness, he’s not the person to call. You’ll need to get each and every one of the U.N.’s disparate member states to sign off on that.
During a briefing at the 80th U.N. General Assembly, UNGA President Annalena Baerbock subtly summed up the leader’s limitations.
“The proposals set forth in the secretary-general’s report are not prescriptive,” she assured member states. “They are an invitation to reflect, to question, to innovate, and above all, to engage.”
Read: How much power does the UN secretary-general have to reform the body?
UNOPS’ umpteenth chapter
Do you remember the scandal that rocked a prominent U.N. agency back in 2022? We do, because we helped expose it. Today, there’s been a new twist in the long-running saga of financial mismanagement at the U.N. Office for Project Services, or UNOPS.
Vitaly Vanshelboim, the former senior UNOPS official accused of accepting about $3 million in improper gifts for himself and family members, is battling Spanish prosecutors who are seeking his extradition to the United States to stand trial on bribery charges.
So far, he’s losing.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that a three-judge panel concluded there was enough evidence that he engaged in bribery, wire fraud, and money laundering to extradite him. The court’s ruling, however, is subject to appeal and final approval by the Spanish government.
In April 2022, Devex reported that the U.N. was investigating the loss of tens of millions of dollars in a UNOPS project aimed at building more than 1 million affordable homes and wind farms in six countries.
Ultimately, not even a “single house was built,” a chief financial officer from UNOPS told a U.N. tribunal.
The tribunal upheld a U.N. decision to hold Vanshelboim personally accountable for $58 million in losses, dock him a year’s net pay, and block payouts on his pension until he repaid the financial losses.
“The fact that this process has dragged on for years, despite abundant evidence, is unacceptable and undermines confidence in the system,” Chris Lu, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. for management and reform and who was heavily involved in the UNOPS case, tells Colum. “Extradition would be a crucial test of accountability.”
Read: Former UN official awaits extradition to US on bribery charge
From our archives: What went wrong with UNOPS’ ambitious impact-investing initiative?
Still standing
USAID is no more. But MCC and DFC are hanging in there.
I’m referring to the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, both of which have quietly kept their heads down and gone back to work amid the wider unraveling of U.S. foreign assistance.
Unlike more grant-dependent agencies, DFC relies less on annual appropriations and more on returns and loan repayments, earning it bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress, my colleague Elissa Miolene writes.
The MCC’s grant-based model, on the other hand, works through “compacts,” which offer time-bound grants to countries that meet strict governance and reform standards to spur economic growth.
But the agency survived the gauntlet of the Trump administration’s foreign aid review — and while half of its programs were slated for cancellation, it was still better than the fate USAID met.
For Alice Albright, who served as MCC’s head until January 2025, the agency’s resilience is down to two factors she found sacrosanct: its compact model and the way it values partner countries’ eligibility for grants. The former, Albright told the audience at Devex Impact House on the sidelines of the World Bank-IMF annual meetings, ensures that partner countries contribute to a project’s success — and as a result, are better poised to take over once the U.S. exits. The latter, she said, ensures countries are on “the right path” to benefit from MCC funding.
“MCC continues,” she trumpeted — while sprinkling a dose of reality on her optimism.
“I do worry about MCC’s future,” Albright added. “Right now, it seems to be holding strong, but you could easily see a situation where any of [those factors are] cast aside, then somebody could ask the question, well, why have it to begin with?”
Read: Amid shutdown and transformation, what’s going on with MCC and DFC?
Doubling down
Twenty-eight World Food Prize laureates and humanitarian chef José Andrés are advocating for a doubling of investment in emergency food assistance and sustainable agriculture. In a public letter released today, they highlight the worsening global hunger crisis: 700 million people go hungry daily, over 2 billion people are food-insecure, and nearly 25% of children are stunted by malnutrition.
They emphasize that the fundamental human right to food, affirmed over 75 years ago, remains unfulfilled. “We call on leaders across governments, industry, and civil society to strengthen their own contributions to the collective task of freeing the world from hunger,” they write.
Why double aid? “It’s an order of magnitude,” the Rev. David Beckmann, former president of Bread for the World and 2010 World Food Prize laureate, tells my colleague Tania Karas. “This is a way of saying we have a big problem here, and we need to do a lot more, not less.”
The letter outlines four key demands: sustained emergency food relief to prevent famine; accelerated agricultural productivity for long-term food security; promotion of prosperity and food security for all; and collective responsibility for ending hunger. They stress that hunger is a shared challenge that requires engagement from all sectors of society.
The letter was released during the World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogue conference in Des Moines, Iowa. The World Food Prize — known as the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture — is awarded to people who are confronting global hunger by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food. This year’s honoree, Mariangela Hungria — a Brazilian microbiologist credited with vastly improving the country’s agricultural output through the use of biological rather than chemical fertilizers — will be honored in a ceremony Thursday in Des Moines.
Read: World Food Prize laureates call for doubling of food and agriculture aid
Background reading: Brazilian microbiologist wins 2025 World Food Prize
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In other news
The International Court of Justice is set to issue an advisory opinion today on whether Israel has a legal obligation to ensure unimpeded humanitarian aid flows into Gaza and the occupied West Bank. [Barron's]
Thailand is now allowing long-term refugees from Myanmar permission to work in response to global aid cuts and the country’s labor shortages. [The Guardian]
China and Russia have repeatedly tried to cut funding for the U.N. Human Rights Office and its investigations over the past five years, though their efforts have been unsuccessful, according to a report. [Reuters]
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About the author
Anna Gawel
Anna Gawel is the Managing Editor of Devex. She previously worked as the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat, the flagship publication of D.C.’s diplomatic community. She’s had hundreds of articles published on world affairs, U.S. foreign policy, politics, security, trade, travel and the arts on topics ranging from the impact of State Department budget cuts to Caribbean efforts to fight climate change. She was also a broadcast producer and digital editor at WTOP News and host of the Global 360 podcast. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.
