POPULATION: UNFPA Plans Expansion Amid U.N. Financial Cutbacks

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 28 1997 (IPS) - The U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) is planning to expand its field operations at a time when most cash- strapped U.N. institutions are struggling to stay afloat.

“We have a budget proposal to increase our field staff,” UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik told IPS, “and we have no plans to downsize.”

Sadik said UNFPA currently has its own field offices in 67 countries, and will soon add six more: in Guinea-Bissau, Chad, Laos, Mongolia, Jordan and Turkey. Currently, the population programmes in all six countries are being supervised by UNFPA field offices in neighbouring countries.

“I think there is a big correlation between the presence of a UNFPA representative and the rate of implementation of programmes,” Sadik said. The size of the programmes in the six proposed new locations are large enough to warrant a UNFPA presence, she added.

In contrast, both the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are not only cutting staff but also downsizing their operations. The agencies’ recent financial woes are caused mainly by a decline in funds, sparked by Western aid cuts, and the payment of dues in currencies that have declined in value against the strong U.S. dollar.

UNDP Administrator James Gustave Speth said last week that nearly 30 percent of his core staff worldwide has been reduced over the past six years.

UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy plans to lay off more than 400 staffers, both in New York and in field operations, before the end of this year. But the numbers of actual cuts are likely to be much lower than that projection because of staff buyouts and relocations.

The layoffs have also been prompted by an attempt to decentralise the New York-based UNICEF, which protects the interests of children and mothers worldwide. UNDP has a staff of about 6,750, UNICEF about 6,000 and UNFPA about 675 worldwide.

UNFPA’s average annual income has been around 300 million dollars. Last year, the agency boasted an income of about 309.4 million dollars, which represented a slight decrease from its 1995 income of 312.6 million dollars.

Although contributions in 1996 decreased in U.S. dollar terms by 0.13 percent compared to 1995, many countries actually increased their contributions from the previous year — but did so in national currencies which declined in value against the dollar. Sadik complained that UNFPA lost about 15 million dollars this year as a result of the strengthening of the dollar against national currencies.

With its dwindling resources, however, UNFPA has rationalised its resource allocations by adjusting its categorisation of countries that require population assistance.

The procedure, endorsed by its executive board last year, allocates about 67 to 69 percent of its resources to countries that fall in to Category ‘A’ — the neediest cases — 22 to 24 percent to less impoverished countries in Category ‘B’, and 5 to 7 percent to the relatively wealthier countries in Category ‘C’.

UNFPA currently gets most of its funding through voluntary contributions pledged in national currencies from its major donors, including Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan and Germany. Fourteen countries, whose contributions were each at least one million dollars, contributed a total of 296 million dollars to UNFPA — 90 percent of the Fund’s core resources.

In its 1996 annual report, UNFPA said that its total income for 1995-96 exceeded 600 million dollars, in large part stemming from the strong momentum created by the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo.

For 1997, based on pledges and projections of the major donors, UNFPA is likely once again to exceed the 300-million-dollar mark. The 1998 Pledging Conference is scheduled to take place in early November.

But the declining trend in development assistance worldwide is as worrying to UNFPA, as it is to both UNDP and UNICEF.

The population agency is also complaining that determining the actual income level of a voluntarily funded organisation is “full of uncertainty.”In 1996, for example, more than a third of UNFPA’s total pledged income was still unpaid towards the end of the year. “This caused significant cash flow problems for the organisation, requiring UNFPA to draw down on its operational reserves to meet its commitments,” the report said.

At the same time, UNFPA sees an encouraging trend toward increasing population assistance. In 1994, overall assistance to population programmes reached 1.6 billion dollar, and in 1995 it neared 2.0 billion dollars.

But Sadik’s biggest complaint is that most industrial nations are not delivering on the promises they made to provide assistance to implement the Plan of Action adopted at the ICPD in Cairo. In May Sadik warned donors that shortfalls in promised assistance would have catastrophic consequences for population programmes in developing countries.

“If donors don’t meet their targets, we could have at least 120 million additional unwanted pregnancies, 49 million abortions, five million deaths of infants and young children, and 65,000 maternal deaths over the period 1995-2000,” Sadik said.

The ICPD put a price tag of 17 billion dollars on a 20-year Programme of Action designed to tackle global population issues and promote human-centred development. The programme is intended to provide basic reproductive health services, including family planning, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, and population research.

Of the 17 billion dollars required by the year 2000 and 21.7 billion dollars by 2015, only 9.5 billion dollars was committed in 1995. Developing nations spent 7.5 billion dollars of that amount, while international assistance — mostly in the form of grants and loans — amounted to only about two billion dollars.