Q&A: UNDP administrator on reforms, staffing, and the agency's future

ISTANBUL — The United Nations Development Programme is going through an era of change. From broader U.N. reform shifts to a new private sector strategy and more, the agency’s administrator has been working to make the organization fit for the future of development. Devex sat down with UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner to discuss the new private sector strategy, some of his internal reforms and system changes, staffing and what he sees as the future of the agency. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You’re rolling out a new private sector strategy, including creating about 60 impact labs in countries around the world aimed at harnessing innovation. Does that mean you are going to have to hire new staff, look for a different skill set or add new training? My problem is not that I don't have creative people in UNDP. It’s UNDP, in the sense of the economy of delivery in which we have been operating in — the inertia that to some extent exists in public institutions. Our people have not been able to evolve the offer. I mean, the idea of the accelerator labs was not born in my head sitting in New York. It occurred to me as I traveled and met our teams in countries and started discovering how they were basically launching these labs almost as an act of desperation or experimentation. Because the traditional system of managing projects and programs simply wasn't giving them the freedom. So this was a bottom-up inspired corporate rethink. Amongst our staff, there are many people who are capable of being the future employees but we need to invest in them and we need to give them the conditions. “We have a moment in which we have to retool our organization and at the same time invest in the further development of skills for our staff.” --— Achim Steiner, administrator, UNDP We've just launched a new, what you would traditionally call a human resources strategy, we call it a People for 2030 strategy, which is a fundamental recalibration of how we will essentially manage and invest in our people who are 99 percent of the currency with which we operate. Our people are the people that governments turn to. So, [if] we have the wrong people, we are out of business, so to speak. The second part is enabling them also to take advantage of the state of the art developments that are out there. So UNDP just started a digital UNDP strategy that will, over the next 22 months, transform the organization both in terms of digitization, utilizing the power of data and modern technology, to essentially run the organization better and more effectively. And secondly, the digitalization which is really how countries and economies are moving into this domain and what is the competence that UNDP with its staff will be able to offer. So here we will have to invest significantly in raising competence levels. I, therefore, do not conclude that we have the wrong people, but we have a moment in which we have to retool our organization and at the same time invest in the further development of skills for our staff. You talked about some of the challenges being as a result of a sense of inertia at big public institutions. How do you change some of the bureaucratic systems that are holding people back at UNDP? One of my positive discoveries since I joined UNDP and headed it, which is almost two years, is that the bureaucracy does not rest in the heads of the people, it is locked in by administrative procedures, by funding agreements, by the nature with which we manage the organization from a corporate point of view. You have to change the conditions within which people are able to work. And in a sense what I'm trying to do right now with my senior management team is to set the organization free. Because the people who work in 170 countries, they are working at the cutting edge of development; they're engaged in real-life projects. How do you begin to create that corporate set of conditions? Well, I’ll give you examples: the people strategy, the digital strategy, the accelerator labs, and experiments such as the Finance Sector Hub. Another one is the Global Policy Network. In a very brief nutshell, our problem is we have 17,000 staff working across the world. It's an extraordinary repository of expertise but the way we operate that network is essentially 20th century, which is by Filofax and Rolodexes and people knowing each other and phoning someone saying, “can you maybe point to something?” So we have just revamped that entire system and are building up a global policy network that will be digitally supported but also far less sectorally oriented and far more oriented around, “How do I connect someone in Cambodia with the five people around the world that are working for us on a new social welfare system reform or on gender-based violence?” How do you help a country tackle that? This is the knowledge connectivity where we're trying to create a platform for in UNDP. So those are the ways in which you begin to change the conditions under which people deliver. Then you can also create incentives. You’ve also worked to try to reduce the paperwork and administrative tasks at UNDP. What have you seen as a result of those changes? By cutting out a lot of procedural stuff that was redundant we believe that on average we have saved 33 days of work per program manager a year. I'm still monitoring that. Let's see. In the midst of an extraordinary challenging year for UNDP — you're aware of the U.N. reform — against all of this our staff have delivered a record delivery of projects and programs last year and we have broken a new record in revenue. Last year, UNDP increased its revenue by over $380 million in the midst of the most disruptive period in its recent history. At the same time … we had to recruit 130 new team leaders of every country team because of the shift of the [Resident Coordinators]. I think part of it is ... that we created incentives, we created a sort of vision of where to go. But it's also because we are freeing people up to do the work that they actually came to do at UNDP. Where do you see UNDP going moving forward? “Where I'm trying to take UNDP is not to pretend that it is a startup or it's an NGO … But the world needs some big development institutions partly on things like climate change or pandemics or inequality.” --— Where I'm trying to take UNDP is not to pretend that it is a startup or it's an NGO. I mean it can't be, it is a big machine. But the world needs some big development institutions partly on things like climate change or pandemics or inequality. We need to reach the global community of nations quickly and directly. And that's where a UNDP is a very direct way of being able to send impulses on key issues very quickly across the world. We should never pretend that a multilateral organization can just shed all its fiduciary and administrative [processes], what some call bureaucracy. And frankly speaking, donors also give money to UNDP partly because in places where they can't operate it’s the organization that provides fiduciary integrity and a degree of accountability that few others would be able to deliver. We are working in Yemen right now, where literally within 24 hours of the forces withdrawing from Hodeida port, we began repairing the infrastructure. We employed 4,000 people to demine and replant trees and basically create jobs, and there are not many organizations in the middle of such a dangerous and difficult situation that can scale up overnight. That is part of the asset value of a large international organization and I want to have UNDP deliver to that value proposition while at the same time rediscovering the frontier of development. Editor’s note: UNDP facilitated Devex's travel for this reporting. However, Devex maintains full editorial control of the content.