UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres briefs reporters on the UN80 Initiative on the restructuring of the world body. Credit: United Nations

By Laura Johnson and Ian Richards
GENEVA, Jun 5 2025 (IPS)

Like you, we attended last week’s townhall where UN High Commissioner (for Human Rights) Volker Turk presented his latest plans for moving staff out of headquarters. We note that this project has been carried out without adequate consultation with the staff union. The key points we learned and which we are concerned about:

• It’s expensive: It will involve the move of 120 staff. We conservatively estimate the cost of relocation or indemnities at $12 million. We did not hear any figures to show whether the moves will justify the cost in the long run.


Volker Turk

• It’s mandate is unclear: Volker Turk claims that the General Assembly backed his project. Reading the relevant resolution, it is not clear how he inferred this.

• The justification is questionable: The main reason given was increased demand for OHCHR’s physical presence within countries. We would like to see the letters from governments requesting this. Instead, we hear from you that governments are generally less keen on OHCHR presence, are delaying visas and discouraging meetings on the ground with civil society.

• It’s being rushed unnecessarily: Staff may have mere months to move. One Director told her staff that if they didn’t like it, they could leave, despite the initial management rhetoric of ‘moving posts not people’. We don’t understand the urgency. For UN 80 the current plan is for moves to take place in summer 2026. In addition, if UN 80 results in human rights activities from other entities being merged with OHCHR, new changes might be necessary and such moves might prove premature and unjustified.

• Personal considerations are not taken into account: staff with special constraints have not been listened to, despite this being a key element of the UN’s overall mobility policy. There has been no compendium developed and management has not informed staff on how to contest a move if necessary.

• It copies UNHCR without learning the lessons: UNHCR also expanded regional offices to embellish the organigramme. With the financial crisis, these middle layer offices, neither headquarters nor field, are seen as a luxury, reminiscent of an empire-building past, and are being downsized. Repeating the same mistake at OHCHR carries risks for staff. At the same time OHCHR is a normative entity not an operational one that requires regular mandatory rotation. In the last three years, Volker Turk’s vision appears to have shifted from the former to the latter.

• Questions about conflicts of interest persist: There will be expansion at the Vienna regional field office, which has triggered allegations of favouritism. We have received concerns from you and would appreciate clarification from management on the ethical guardrails used.

We understand that this restructuring will make the careers of some, and we wish them well. But this is being done at huge expense to many on the basis of unclear reasons and objectives that may raise sustainability questions in the future.

Many of you have been in touch about the personal costs these sudden changes will have and the harm you believe it will do to the Office.

In the last few years, human rights around the world have been taking a turn for the worse. We call on Volker Turk and member states to make sure that OHCHR is strengthened rather than being weakened through wasting money, moving staff for the sake of moving, modelling OHCHR after a humanitarian agency, and splashing $12 million on empire-building.

We also call on Volker Turk to treat his staff with the dignity that all human beings deserve in the workplace. This includes hearing each staff member’s concerns with care and attention.

IPS UN Bureau

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With presidents onsite, nothing can go wrong. How does the UN Protocol team prepare?. Credit: UN Photo

By Ian Richards
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 6 2023 (IPS)

When heads of state, heads of government and top diplomats from around the globe flock to New York for high-level week beginning September 19, it marks the culmination of many months of intensive preparation for the United Nations Protocol and Liaison Service.

In addition to the general debate of the General Assembly, numerous other events with VIP participation take place at the UN headquarters and at other locations around the city that week. The Secretary-General receives visitors in rapid succession, and the same is true for the Deputy Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly.

“Basically, our team makes sure everyone is at the right place at the right time,” says Beatrix Kania, the Chief of Protocol of the United Nations.

The Protocol and Liaison Service is part of the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management of the United Nations. Each September, the normally 12-person strong team is reinforced with volunteers from within the Secretariat and protocol experts from other duty stations around the globe.

While preparations for the General Assembly have been going on throughout the year, in August and September the headquarters start buzzing with coordination meetings for the many different events and walk-throughs with advance delegations from capitals. Flags are steamed and standing arrangement for photo-ops prepared.

To make any event a success, good cooperation across the Secretariat and with the permanent missions to the United Nations is key. “We plan every event to the last detail. But there will always be changes. Your next speaker may be held up in another meeting, a video may not start – and then you have to react quickly and find a solution.

For example, for the General Assembly, we always try to have the next two speakers already backstage in a special area which is called GA 200,” explains Kania.

Since almost all heads of delegations request a meeting with the Secretary-General, bilateral meetings take place on the 27th floor during the General Assembly. There, several VIP holding rooms, a room for a photo op, the meeting room itself as well as offices for the Secretary-General and his team allow for a seamless transition from one encounter to the next.

When VIPs and their delegations are held up or do not make it back to the headquarters in time, another visitor may have to be pulled forward. If this happens, flags need to be exchanged, other media representatives will need to be brought in to capture the photo op, and the internal UN participants in the meeting may be different.

“We maintain contact with the delegations at all times, but the traffic is pretty bad around the UN during High-Level Week. Sometimes, we see the delegation we are waiting for from the windows on the 27th floor, stuck in traffic on First Avenue and unable to come in,” says the Chief of Protocol.

In the run-up to High-Level Week, the protocol team approves thousands of grounds passes for temporary delegates from capitals and registers the members of permanent missions and observer offices – who also traditionally change in summer. Some countries send delegations which are a few hundred members strong for the events in September. Therefore, crowd control becomes an issue as well.

There are a limited number of seats in each room, so each delegation can only bring a limited number of people to each event. In cooperation with the substantive office responsible for an event and the Department for Safety and Security, the Protocol and Liaison Services distributes special access cards for most events.

The most exciting day this year will be 19 September. This is when the General Debate opens at 9 a.m. and the General Assembly Hall will be filled to the last seat. To kick things off there is a welcoming event for Heads of State and Government takes place from 8 a.m. in the ECOSOC chamber and the Northern Delegates’ Lounge.

“We have people at the curb to receive and escort our visitors and people in the room to introduce our guests to the Secretary-General, the Deputy-Secretary-General and the Chef de Cabinet. We also prepare GA 200 and attend to the VIP seating area in the General Assembly Hall,” explains Kania.

Once the meeting starts, the Secretary-General will first present his report on the work of the organization, followed by the President of the General Assembly. Since 1947, Brazil has been the first country to speak at the General Debate, traditionally followed by the President of the United States, the host country.

The opening of the general debate will be framed by two summits: On Monday, the “SDG Summit” will take place, and on Wednesday, the Secretary-General will be announcing a “Climate Ambition Summit”.

Three health-focused meetings on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as well as a ministerial meeting to prepare the 2024 “Summit for the Future” will bring large numbers of participants to New York this September.

With approximately 14,700 delegates, 2019 saw the highest number of participants so far, but the protocol team expects to reach a new record number in 2023.

Ian Richards is Deputy Editor, UN TODAY

Source: UN TODAY, the official magazine of international civil servants, Geneva

The link to the website: https://untoday.org/

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: United Nations

By Amy Shelver and Ian Richards
GENEVA, Switzerland, Feb 7 2023 (IPS)

New UNCTAD software does to digital government what IKEA did to furniture, allowing Bhutan’s government employees to create their own user-friendly services for citizens online.

Tedious government procedures aren’t just a pain for users, they’re a bore for the civil servants who administer them. Sitting behind a counter and stamping forms isn’t exactly a dream job.

This is where technology can help. In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bhutanese government launched the G2B digital government portal. It’s a ground-breaking piece of software that earned the country recognition as the fastest place in the world to start a new business.

Entrepreneurs simply fill out a form on their mobile phones, and receive all registration documents at no cost, in less than a minute. In 2022, 5,500 Bhutanese, almost 1% of the population, used the service to register a business – 52% of them were women. It’s also a turning point for Bhutan’s public administration and for the world of digital government in general.

The fastest business registration service on Earth wasn’t designed by consultants in India or California but by the very civil servants who had previously administered the time-consuming, paper-only process that required citizens to go from one government office queue to another.

How did this happen?

Keep it simple

It’s all down to the low-code simplicity of the UNCTAD digital government platform, which after some basic training, Bhutan’s civil servants were able to customize themselves to create online services. The coverage of these services is now vast and includes permits to run bus services, authorizations to fly drones and leases for industrial parks.

Over the next two years, the government plans to include all permits, authorizations and procedures related to the country’s economy in the platform. With time it could stretch across all government departments.

“The goal of our technology is to ease friction,” says Frank Grozel, who heads UNCTAD’s digital government platform programme. “Everyone wins from having effective, uncomplicated technology at their fingertips. But this is especially important for civil servants, because it allows them to focus on why they do their job and not necessarily how they do it.”

Better service delivery

Each service is built from the bottom up. Government teams, including civil servants working on the procedure, developers and trainers came together to simplify existing steps, creating shortcuts that help accelerate service delivery.

Employees are guided to understand the process from the user’s point of view, generating empathy and understanding of where the bottlenecks and frustrations can be.

“Whole teams have started to see how the system could be changed, and why elements of the original process could have felt so painful to the end user,” said Bita Mortazavi, UNCTAD’s project manager for the Bhutan initiative.

The impact on staff has been transformative. “We can now focus on service development and select simple services, with large impact, to change entire systems,” said Sonam Lhamo, project lead at Bhutan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Tshering Dorji, a developer, said it changed his perspective in software development. “My imagination improved a lot. I learned how to simplify without coding,” he said.

Another developer, Pema Gyalpo, was pleasantly surprised.

“We can further simplify even the simple things,” he said. “The experience of building this easier system was not about work, but how we’re going to work [in the future]. I’ll be privileged to send ideas which will serve other countries.”

Innovate first, regulate later

Most Bhutanese businesses are small. About 95% of them are cottage enterprises. This reality drove the country’s government to seek ways to help the mountain nation’s micro-enterprises succeed in the quickest, simplest way.

“Our approach is to innovate first, regulate later, so as to reduce entry barriers for new businesses, embrace innovation and allow creativity to flourish,” said Bhutan’s minister of economic affairs, Tengye Lyonpo.

This ethos has delivered results for the country whose unconventional approaches are working for it and its citizens in novel ways.

While Bhutan has been pioneering the flatpack approach to digital government, making services modular and easier to create, thanks to funding from the Netherlands, other countries are set to follow. Colombia, Estonia, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Togo and Tunisia will join the club this year.

Countries already benefiting from the platform include Argentina, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Lesotho and Mali.

Amy Shelver is an expert on digitalization and the creative economy and Ian Richards is an economist at UNCTAD specializing in digital business environments.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Ian Richards
GENEVA, Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

Last week the World Bank announced it was “discontinuing” its “Doing Business” report, which ranks countries on the ease of opening and operating a company.

It cited the outcome of an investigation that found the World Bank had changed the rankings under pressure of funding. This wasn’t the first time the rankings had come in for criticism. A 2008 internal evaluation report highlighted their lack of transparency, while in 2018 the Bank’s chief economist, Paul Romer, resigned decrying data manipulation.

In truth, the rankings had for some time faced a credibility issue. My colleagues and I saw this first hand. And there were a number of reasons for it.

Firstly, Doing Business had become too politicised. It was originally intended as a way to measure improvements in countries’ business environments. It used an index score based on the number of procedures and time to for example start a business or get a construction permit – there were ten indicators.

However, the Bank also used it to rank countries, fêting top scorers and reformers. Governments soon saw a good ranking as an end in itself, regardless of how it impacted their development. A slip in rank could be politically damaging.

The rankings ostensibly promised a rigorous evaluation of each country’s business environment. Yet with a small team in Washington DC operating in what the investigation described as a toxic environment, much of the work evaluating the ten indicators in 190 countries was farmed out to national volunteer panels, who were asked to amend or approve pre-filled questionnaires.

Credit: World Bank

Not all were experts on the matter and some did not even work in the country. Many we spoke to barely gave the questionnaire a glance before signing off. Further, the English questionnaires posed challenges in countries where the language isn’t commonly spoken.

The result was that governments didn’t always see their hard work reflected in the rankings, leading to lobbying campaigns that, perhaps unsurprisingly, favoured those with greater weight and not always in the right way.

Some governments complained that their score changed for little reason, and in the case of Chile, according to the party in power. The untransparent nature of the changes contrasts for example with UNCTAD’s Global Enterprise Registration index, which specifically invites input from the public.

The investigation confirmed a perception that rankings were helped by paying the World Bank to advise on reforms instead of turning to development institutions such as UNCTAD or UNDP.
It noted that, “the vast majority of Bank employees that we spoke to raised the issue of the inherent conflict of interest that advisory services create.”

The methodology also had its flaws. It did little to distinguish between good procedures, such as ensuring compliance with environmental rules, and unnecessary red tape, such as requiring yet another stamped and notarised copy of a document.

And while reforms to the business environment can be measured in the number of days and procedures saved, it didn’t measure their impact.

For example, at the start of Covid we helped Benin move the process of creating a business online, meaning it could be done from a mobile phone instead of spending days queuing at government offices in the tropical sun. It also cut total time to two hours. But it didn’t end there.

As a result of the changes, which made life easier for those short on time or far from the capital, the number of companies created increased by 43 percent, half started by under-30s, half in rural areas and a third owned by women. This impact, more than a simple ranking, should be the real cause for celebration.

So, what happens next? The Bank’s board has said it will “be working on a new approach to assessing the business and investment climate.” What could this look like, how can it encourage real development, how can it be depoliticised, and is it still relevant?

Doing Business is meant to promote development by making it easier for the private sector to operate.

Therefore, it shouldn’t just measure if reforms make procedures easier on paper, but if they’re actually leading to more companies being created, and if so where and by whom? In other words, is there a real development impact?

It should also measure if procedures are clearly understood. Because lack of clarity on which paperwork to prepare, where to go, how much to pay and what to expect often discourages business owners from registering, perpetuating the informal economy. Hanoi municipality in Vietnam shows how this can be done well.

The team should be sufficiently staffed to operate without an extensive reliance on volunteers, and any desk analysis should be double-checked with field visits to government offices, backed by surveys of private companies.

The team’s independence could be protected by a committee with membership from other development organisations. That committee would oversee the elaboration of each report. It would also hear appeals from governments who feel that the index does not correctly capture their situation.

The construction of the index should be published online, including the data collected, decisions on outliers and any other assumptions, such that a member of the public with adequate statistical expertise could reasonably generate the same results.

For transparency’s sake, the consideration of appeals by governments should also be published.

The index should be less political. This means no rankings. Reforms aren’t a race, and quality trumps quantity. An improved business environment is a means to an end but not an end in itself.

The final question though is whether such an index is still needed at a time when many governments, pushed by Covid and the demands of younger entrepreneurs, are shifting their administrative procedures online.

Earlier this year, Bhutan made it possible for small business owners to register their companies through a government website and receive automatically-generated legal documents by email in seconds.

As more governments adopt that same platform and technology, countries will soon be separated by hours or minutes rather than weeks and days. Procedures will be reduced to a single step.

Under this scenario, it is not clear that there will be anything left for Doing Business to measure.

Ian Richards, a development economist at the UN, helps governments improve their business environments and attract investment.

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Skyline of the City of London, United Kingdom. Credit: Unsplash/Ali Yaqub

By Ian Richards
GENEVA, Mar 22 2021 (IPS)

It’s now almost three months since the United Kingdom entered into a new trade agreement with the European Union.

During that time, we’ve seen traders struggle to get to grips with the new arrangements. From lorry drivers having their sandwiches confiscated by Dutch customs officers to estimates of additional paperwork costs of $7 billion a year, and pig breeders watching their meat rot on the quayside for want of the correct forms.

It has been a difficult start for a trading relationship once valued at $930 billion, and one that has shown the importance of providing traders in the UK and Europe with clear and simple information of the kind that was not required within the single market.

It was with this in mind that the WTO passed the Bali Trade Facilitation Agreement in 2014.

Although 30 pages long, its most important paragraph is its opening one, which requires each country or customs union to publish information on trade rules and procedures.

As the UK left the European Union it did just that. The day before the new arrangements came into place, it published an online step-by-step guide with instructions on the paperwork required to export everything, from sparkling wine to luxury handbags.

As other landmark trade agreements come on tap, albeit with the purpose of increasing trade, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area, these step-by-step guides have become essential.

The ACFTA is estimated to cover 1.2 billion people with a combined GDP of $3 trillion. The UN Economic Commission for Africa believes it has the potential to boost intra-African trade by half if it eliminates import duties, but to double trade if other obstacles, known as non-tariff barriers, are also reduced. The International Trade Centre (ITC) reckons this will help companies invest in manufacturing across the continent.

To make all this work, it’s important for traders to have access to the right information. As with the UK, a number of African governments have been hard at work.

In 2018, Rwanda unveiled its trade information portal. Using a software platform called eregulations from the UN Conference on Trade (UNCTAD), it features rules for importers, exporters and those transiting through the country, as well as market analysis tools, information specific to each border crossing (Rwanda has many) and a helpdesk.

East Africa’s Freight Logistics magazine called it a “game changer”.

Theoneste Sikubwabo, a chicken exporter, told the local media, “we were saved of the unnecessary costs we used to incur while moving to and from places to inquire about some trade information or gain various certifications”. He said he could now do this “from the comfort of our seats, thanks to the portal.”

Using the same platform, Kenya’s trade agency, Kentrade, also created a portal, which receives 10,000 visitors a month.

But it went a step further. Since last year it has been using the portal to battle red tape, simplifying 48 different export procedures by checking each procedure against the law to see what paperwork really is needed.

For one procedure, requiring food and coffee exporters to register with the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service, it reduced the steps involved from 10 to 5 and the total time from fourteen days to six.

Kentrade then calculated that slashing red tape for this procedure alone would save companies $230 each. They would no longer have to pay secretaries to type up so many letters and forms, directors to check and sign them, nor drivers to take them to government offices and queue up.

It is now looking at all other procedures that agricultural exporters must deal with. The savings in time and money could be considerable.

Indeed, a study by the World Economic Forum noted that actions such as these could contribute even more to trade growth than the traditional route of simply reducing tariffs. For SMEs, for whom the red tape involved with trading can make up a large part of their costs, cross-border sales could increase by between 60 and 80 percent.

The same has been happening outside Africa.

Sri Lanka, known for exporting Ralph Lauren polo shirts, Victoria’s Secret bras and tea, recently unveiled its trilingual trade information portal, which the EU ambassador in Colombo said would help make it easier to export to Europe, and by extension, because the EU’s requirements are particularly stringent, to other countries too.

Meanwhile, Tajikistan’s portal, which covers 1,500 goods and products, was the highest-cited in Asia in terms of maturity by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

In all 18 developing countries now have top-of-the-range trade information portals from UNCTAD and ITC, many of them as advanced, if not more so, than those installed in developed countries.

Trade information portals are the lubricant that keeps trade flowing. They allow small companies to export and grow, countries to attract manufacturing investment and governments to slash red tape. Without them, as we saw with Brexit, trade can quite literally grind to a halt on a distant quayside.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres gets vaccinated against COVID-19 at Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx, New York last week. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Ian Richards
GENEVA, Mar 4 2021 (IPS)

The United Nations is using the digital government technology behind vaccine passports to help developing countries provide essential services to their vulnerable populations.

After a year of Zoom meetings and with vaccinations slowly rolling out, international travel is making a come-back.

The demand is there, even as the virus lingers. Many, especially from developing countries, need to get to work and send remittances home, families need to catch up, countries are getting ready to welcome back tourists and business deals need to be struck.

For this reason, governments are taking a close look at the digital vaccine passport, the post-pandemic equivalent of the yellow fever certificate that could offer the possibility of side-stepping costly PCR tests and quarantine requirements.

The World Health Organization has cautioned against moving too quickly, noting “there are still critical unknowns regarding the efficacy of vaccination in reducing transmission”. Dividing society between haves and have-nots also raises ethical concerns and fears of digital creep.

Despite this, the US, EU, UK and Israel, among others, have announced plans to study the feasibility of vaccine passports that could be carried on a smartphone, while the International Air Transport Association, the World Economic Forum and IBM have versions that are ready to roll out.

The idea behind making vaccine passports digital is both to prevent fraud, given reports of fake PCR tests, and connect to existing online booking, check-in and immigration systems.

On getting vaccinated you upload a digital vaccination certificate to your phone. At check-in or immigration, you scan a QR code, then scan your face to authorise, and the phone shares your vaccination status and linked passport details using an encrypted system that also verifies the validity of the certificate against a register on what is called the blockchain.

However, all other personal information, including for facial recognition, stays on your phone. This is different to mobile boarding passes, which are not secure, nor intended to be, and from which anyone who catches a glimpse of the bar code can extract information.

The technology is not new. The UN’s trade agency, UNCTAD, is using a similar digital identity system to help the Iraqi government handle business licenses, Estonia operates it in many public agencies, and the UN’s pension fund has it to ensure that its retirees are still alive and can continue to be paid.

However, while Covid has helped change many habits, digital documents, even with more basic technology, remain an exception in developing countries, although, as we have seen, the benefits are significant.

Ian Richards

In Lesotho, the One-Stop Business Facilitation Centre went online and noted a sharp reduction in missing fee payments. Civil servants also spent less time carrying files between ministries and more time advising the public.

In Beijing, couples now use self-service kiosks to get married in five minutes (although divorces still need to be done the old-fashioned way).

And El Salvador used an online system to administer Covid relief money. Over half of applicants were women. Indeed, online services help overcome cultural norms, security considerations and family commitments that would otherwise discourage women from going to the capital city, where government offices are most often located, to spend days in long queues.

Online government services that deliver digital documents also provide an opportunity to simplify unnecessarily complicated procedures. As a result, Benin is now the fastest place in the world to start a business.

The use of digital documents can also allow licenses and permits to be delivered automatically, without human intervention, such as in British Columbia.
https://orgbook.gov.bc.ca/en/home

The evidence shows that digital public services are popular. Yet broader adoption remains stymied by a reluctance in many public administrations to move away from paper, fearful of whether technologies can be trusted or unsure of how to implement them.

Here’s where the digital vaccine passport comes in.

As vaccinations roll out, but with immigration authorities talking of making the document mandatory, travellers will want their vaccination to be recognized digitally; their governments will likely accede.

Once governments cross this line, it isn’t hard to see the use of digital government documents, and the simplification that comes with them, becoming matter-of-fact across developing country public administrations– whether for creating companies, paying taxes, buying land or accessing social security.

And with major players having been involved in the development of the vaccine passport, there will be plenty of computer code, lying around in places like Github, to borrow from.

The biggest beneficiaries, as demonstrated in the few countries that have moved online, are those traditionally left behind: women, young people and those living far from their capital city.

They are the ones who stand to gain even more as vaccine passports help make digital government more commonplace and acceptable across the developing world.

The author is an economist at the UN working on digital government applications.

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At a 2018 joint meeting of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its Economic and Social Committee, a robot named Sophia had an interactive session with Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

By Ian Richards and Mohamed Chiraz Baly
GENEVA, Feb 23 2021 (IPS)

Some of you may remember Sophia, the talking robot.

In 2017 and 2018 she toured UN meetings and TV studios, wowing audiences with her thoughts on the future of technology and seemingly engaging in conversations with UN deputy chief, Amina Mohammed and British broadcaster, Piers Morgan.

The UN declared her an innovation champion, Elle magazine put her on their cover and Saudi Arabia granted her citizenship, a hat trick of “firsts” for a robot.

Many were impressed by her human qualities. Yet her ability to follow gazes and respond to questions masked the human input required to provide a lifelike experience and pithy one-liners. Those interviewing her reported (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42616687) having to send questions in advance.

And while Sophia certainly created an important debate on the future of artificial intelligence, even her makers, following much criticism, admitted (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16617092/sophia-the-robot-citizen-ai-hanson-robotics-ben-goertzel) that people had been too quick to overestimate her technological ability. Behind the wishful thinking, she was more airline customer service chatbot than human.

Yet while Sophia appears to have disappeared from public view, perhaps as a result of Covid-19 (which also appears to have diminished our faith in airline customer service chatbots), digital diplomacy, as we discovered during this year’s International Mother Tongue Day, isn’t immune to technological overhype.

Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

Next month the UN will test a new virtual interpretation system at the 14th Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice to be held in Kyoto. A number of delegates will be travelling there, but the UN’s interpreters in Vienna and New York, that would have normally joined the conference, will instead be staying at home.

Working early morning and late night shifts they will interpret the meeting’s negotiations into the six UN languages over the internet. Think of it as being in a Teams or Zoom meeting. Not only do you have to try and understand exactly what is being said, but you also need to interpret it into another language and feed it back down the same line.

The biggest challenge won’t be “you’re on mute,” but the poor sound quality.

Experience from using the system during lockdown, when there was no other choice, showed how poor sound quality and failing connections made the work more daunting, as interpreters need a higher quality of sound than a normal listener to perform their job correctly.

Interpreters reported acute acoustic shock, tinnitus, headaches, and nausea. The poor sound quality is because the platforms currently on the market compress the sound to push the back and forth of languages down the line at the same time. None of the systems are ISO-compliant.

The UN is not alone with these problems.

An article (https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/virtual-parliament-interpreters-injuries_ca_5eb55c99c5b6a67335415963) on the Canadian parliament, which operates in English and French, noted that, “coping with iffy audio quality, occasional feedback loops, new technology and MPs who speak too quickly has resulted in a steep increase in interpreters reporting workplace injuries”.

Assumptions about the powers of technology have also affected the UN’s translators. Following the introduction of a new computer-assisted translation tool, they have been told to increase their daily productivity target from 5 pages of often dense technical text, to 5.8.

The software has been hyped as a google translate on steroids. But a recent survey of its users showed that view was far from shared.

While recognizing its benefits, eighty percent of translators said they would not be able to meet the new productivity targets while maintaining minimum standards of quality. One said the software was “often slow and time consuming, rather than time-saving, and its role is way overrated.”

Another commented that rewriting poor machine translations demanded more time than translating from scratch. Several noted that computer-assisted translations could not compensate an overall decline in the quality of the original texts that translators received.

This year’s International Mother Tongue Day was devoted to multilingualism.

But two years ago, the UN General Assembly rightly noted that “multilingualism promotes unity in diversity and international understanding, tolerance and dialogue”, and recognized its contribution in “promoting international peace and security”.

Technology has an important role in promoting communications between linguistic groups, and has already made an important difference. But as with Sophia, this year we need to be as much aware of what it can do as what it can’t.

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Credit: UN Conference on Trade Development (UNCTAD), Geneva

By Ian Richards
GENEVA, Nov 24 2020 (IPS)

Until recently, Benin was best known for its cotton exports and its vibrant clothing designs. Since this year it is also the fastest place in the world to start a company. By providing a full online service, the government helped entrepreneurs create businesses and jobs during the pandemic. A third of Benin’s new entrepreneurs are women.

Earlier this year Sandra Idossou, a Beninese entrepreneur who had earlier run a media business, decided she wanted to open a handicrafts shop in the country’s bustling commercial capital, Cotonou. Having found a shop space, her next step was to obtain a permit to operate the business.

With Covid restrictions in place and enforced by the authorities, she logged into monentreprise.bj (in English, mybusiness), Benin’s new business registration website. Within ten minutes on her smartphone she had entered her information, photographed and uploaded her identity documents and paid by credit card. Two hours later, an email arrived with her certificates of incorporation, and her business was officially created.

Sandra benefited from a UN digital government platform, called eRegistrations, which now places Benin, jointly with Estonia, as the fastest in the world in which to start a company, jumping ahead of New Zealand, Georgia and Hong Kong, China. The EU average is three days, in New York it is seven days.

ERegistrations operates in seven other developing countries (Argentina, Cameroon, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Lesotho and Mali) with installation underway in two more (Bhutan and Cuba). The aim of the UN’s platform is not to beat world records, but to make official procedures more accessible and transparent, particularly for small businesses.

Laurent Gangbes, who runs Benin’s investment and export Promotion agency (APIEx), which operates monentreprise.bj, implemented with the help of Dutch funding, is proud of what it has achieved.

“Entrepreneurs and foreign investors told me they wanted to set up a business from their mobile phone so as to avoid unnecessary travel. We brought together several government services and worked to simplify forms and cut procedures to the strict minimum required.”

“This shows that when it comes to digital government, African countries are leapfrogging ahead of the rest of the world to be the best,” he added.

Paper-based administrative procedures are characterized around the world by long queues outside government offices, rude staff, frustrated users and the thump of rubber stamps.

But the reality can be worse, with the need to visit many different government departments, a bewildering array of forms mostly asking the same information, repeated demands for certified copies of identity documents, long waits for procedures that could be automatic, and occasionally requests for bribes.

Credit: UNCTAD, Geneva

The time taken and the cost to pay an agent to deal with the paperwork can at best deter and at worst put creating a legal business out of reach. This results in many developing country SMEs and workers left in the informal economy, unable to access loans or insurance, lacking legal protections, and contributing neither taxes nor social security.

But it can also lead to political instability. A World Bank study after the Tunisian revolution, which was in part driven by youth unemployment, found that one-third of young entrepreneurs in the country had had difficulties accessing finance because of the administrative burdens associated with company creation.

Administrative barriers are not limited to developing countries. A report by the US Office of Management and Budget calculated that in 2015, Americans spent 9.78 billion hours on federal paperwork.

And when a global pandemic hits, closing government offices and sending staff home, reliance on paper forms can also prevent marriages, land sales and passport renewals.

In Benin, the online platform was launched just before the Covid crisis. But the investment proved its worth. The number of companies created through the platform tripled between February and July, reaching 3,600 applications a month.

One-third of entrepreneurs were women, half were under 30 and half were based outside Cotonou. Government officials were able to check documents and approve company applications from their home, keeping to the two-hour benchmark.

Mr. Gangbes of APIEx is pleased with the results so far.

“During the pandemic the platform also helped those who had lost other sources of family income, as well as vulnerable rural populations, to set up their own business. I am confident this will contribute to Benin’s post-covid economic recovery.” He also thinks the platform is changing the way government works.

“My staff now spend more time advising clients and less time pushing paper. They are happier and more productive. And we are collecting a lot of data on the private sector that will help shape our economic policy.” The next step for the platform is to add new procedures, such as renewing business and trading licenses.

Frank Grozel, who leads the eRegistration programme at UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) thinks the possibilities for the digital government platform are limitless.

“The platform can also be used for land registries, civil registries, social security systems, immigration services. In El Salvador we are using it to help the government fight crime.”

He added that the pandemic had forced governments to accelerate the migration of their services online. “We are seeing huge interest in this area. As with business, the future for governments is digital.”

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UN Staff in Geneva

By Prisca Chaoui and Ian Richards
GENEVA, Sep 29 2020 (IPS)

As the United Nations prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary we have been made aware of an extremely worrying development concerning the future of UN staff contracts.

It seems that UN management is bringing forward plans that, if implemented, will rip up long-established, secure standards of employment and replace them with a model that follows much of the ethos and practices of the ‘gig’ economy, famously characterized by Uber and its contractor drivers.

On Tuesday 29th September, managers from across the UN system will hold a meeting to look at a report on the ‘Future of the United Nations System Workforce’. The report, prepared under the guidance of International Labour Organization (ILO) Director-General Guy Ryder and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, contains much to alarm us.

Instead of understanding the importance of stable, secure contracts of employment to staff during these difficult times, the report recommends a drive to ‘a more agile model contractual modality’, a move that we believe is designed to move staff to short, limited duration contracts.

One crucial section of the report speaks of a new model contract supporting ‘a more agile organization that can rapidly adapt to changing needs and opportunities and scale up and down as needed’. The report notes that these so-called agile contracts could progressively apply to all staff, replacing fixed term and continuing contracts.

The way agile contracts work is that staff would be hired for fixed periods for specific tasks, after which they would be forced to leave and return to their country. They would then have to reapply for a new job and start again from scratch.

There would be no pension scheme and the UN would wash its hands of any long-term obligations towards its loyal staff, many of whom have sacrificed their personal lives in isolated and dangerous locations.

These types of employment arrangements are already controversial when it comes to delivering pizzas in the neighbourhood. So, it’s surprising that the ILO and UN would think they are the future when it comes to delivering humanitarian aid in war zones, providing peacekeeping and defending human rights.

We saw something similar before with contracts called appointments of limited duration, under which staff received a fixed amount with no additions for post adjustment, dependency or education allowance, and no salary scale to ensure equal pay by gender. (Interestingly, Ban Ki-moon abolished them because they were seen as contrary to fair labour standards).

This is revealing as it points to a deliberate ending of career appointments, in particular continuing appointments, an area of concern that we have already brought to your attention.

The rationale for the plans is that the UN needs to have greater agility and responsiveness in dealing with challenges and world events and deliver this in the context of funding constraints and a downturn in the global economy.

We recognize this situation, but are hugely disappointed to see the solutions proposed by the organization, which singularly fail to appreciate the critical importance of the established contracts that sit at the heart of the relationship between staff and employer.

We also believe that if managers want agility, then this is better achieved by investing in training, empowering staff to try different roles, and re-establishing the link between performance and promotion.

Lastly, we are concerned that management’s plans ignore the main reason that UN staff have contract security. It is to be able to act independently from pressures that may be exerted by member states and ensure they are not put in the position of doing the bidding of whichever country or corporation donates the most money to ensure their next job.

We have seen during the pandemic how even the perception of such influence can create huge problems for a UN organization.

For this reason, we call on management to drop their plans for Uber-style contracts at the UN.

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By Ian Richards
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 20 2019 (IPS)

A $64 million plan to move 750 back office jobs from the UN’s main duty stations to four new centralized service centres in Budapest, Montreal, Nairobi and Shenzhen, could end up being a waste of money.

Called the global service delivery model, this holdover from (former UN Secretary-General) Ban Ki-moon hopes to save the organization $23 million a year. Locations were chosen following an Amazon-style bidding war. While the assessment scores remain a closely-guarded secret, low wages played a key part.

The proposal (http://www.undocs.org/a/73/706), currently before the General Assembly, makes a number of promises.

First, that service quality will improve, although with administrative staff working far from their clients and no measurement of current service levels, this is hard to substantiate.

Indeed to-date there has been no study on how different duty stations carry out the same administrative processes and what they could learn from each other. It is also not clear why a relatively new service centre in Entebbe should shift operations to neighbouring Nairobi.

Second, that delivery of administrative services will “follow the sun,” allowing offices and missions to get same-day service in whichever continent they are based. Yet the centre for French-speaking operations in Africa and Europe is slated for Montreal, five to eight time zones away.

The project’s main selling point is financial. Through resulting cost savings, the UN’s 193 member states have been promised that they’ll make back their initial investment by 2022.

But putting figures into the kind of business model used for making investment decisions, and with modest adjustments for capital costs, technology improvements and cost overruns that include fast-rising salaries in some chosen locations (see endnote), it appears unlikely that the project will break even before 2029 – so in ten years instead of three.

By then, with new technologies and ways of working, and the UN preparing for a future beyond its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an entirely different administrative system might be required, rendering the investment obsolete.

On top of that, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in contrast to his predecessor, is pushing decentralization, handing department heads unprecedented powers to hire staff and manage procurement.

They may choose to increase the size of their own on-location administrative offices at the expense of the services they buy from the four centres, undermining an already fragile business case.

From a business point of view, the global service delivery model, not forgetting the associated disruption, would appear to be a poor investment; such a finding is of course not unusual and in line with experiences elsewhere.

But with the UN facing cash shortages, there may be more productive ways to spend $64 million and cheaper ways to reduce administrative overheads.

Footnote:
In developing the model* we took the cost figures provided in A/73/706 and adjusted them as follows:

• We assumed that costs in both the baseline and GSDM options would reduce by 2.5 percent a year. This reflects the impact on headcount of evolving technological improvements as well as recent budget trends concerning posts in administration. Reduced headcount would have the effect of slightly reducing the relative gains of moving to a lower wage location.
• We assumed minor cost overruns of 30 percent, given that the proposal might contain optimistic forecasting, that it might not be possible to mitigate all the risks outlined in the proposal, the likelihood of unforeseen cross-subsidies from other budgets, funds already spent, implementation delays and relatively fast-growing salaries in Budapest, Nairobi and Shenzhen. For context, estimates for Umoja’s overspend run from 120 percent and up.
• We employed a standard net present value calculation, which is standard for investment decision-making, and set a discount rate of 2 percent to reflect the risk-free cost of capital faced by the governments.

*The model was developed jointly with colleagues experienced in management consulting and accounting and is available on request.

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By Ian Richards
GENEVA, Nov 4 2015 (IPS)

When the world’s most powerful ambassadors gathered in New York last week to celebrate the United Nations’ 70th anniversary, it would have been undiplomatic to mention the looming crisis facing the UN’s proudest achievement – its humanitarian aid programmes.

But the diplomats and political leaders at the anniversary concert in the General Assembly Hall, featuring Lang Lang and the Harlem Boys Gospel Choir, were well aware that they have just a few months to avert a fundamental threat to the UN’s ability to deliver its aid programmes effectively.

UN professional staff who deliver emergency relief in some of the most dangerous places in the world are now considering their options after learning that the value of their pay and allowances, including the right to family leave, will be cut by up to 10 per cent next year after a three year pay-freeze. The cuts will be heaviest at the lower grades, thereby falling disproportionately on staff recruited from the same developing countries that the UN is trying to help.

When the cuts were announced to World Food Programme workers in South Sudan, a staff association representative who was there said: “Everyone looked like they’d been punched in the stomach.”

With the UN weathering allegations of corruption and retaliations against whistle-blowers, the last thing it should do is undermine the humanitarian aid programmes that justify its existence and uphold its reputation across the developing world.

In the tragedy that is Syria today, the UN can at least say that it is providing food, shelter and places of safety for the displaced population and people in insecure areas.

The World Food Programme has just over 200 staff in Syria, organising daily food rations for 4.25 million people. The staff regularly cross front lines between government and opposition control in conditions of extreme danger. Work like this has led to 319 UN staff and contractors being killed in service, 325 being injured and 164 kidnappings since 2000.

Lourdes Ibarra, WFP’s Head of Programmes for Syria, and an experienced manager in South Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and other “hardship stations” says: “We work in dangerous, challenging conditions. Some colleagues leave because of the conditions and the strain on their families, and we have lost colleagues who were killed in armed attacks and bombings.

“What keeps us working here is knowing that we can save lives, and to do that takes a highly committed, highly motivated staff.

“One of the most stressful situations is not actually the physical danger – it is the feeling of not being supported by some people we work with, and more so by the UN itself.

“If my staff are not being supported, and conditions mean we cannot make a difference, what do we think will keep them working here?”

Any Member State that votes in favour of these cuts needs to be able to answer that question.

Staff have set up the Fairness for Frontline Workers campaign asking the public across the world to put pressure on their Governments to reject these flawed proposals.

The cuts have been put forward by the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), the pay advisory body for global public sector organisations, in the context of budget constraints forced by austerity. This year’s package affects 32,000 globally mobile UN staff; next year the ICSC turns its attention to the 62,000 local staff.

The ICSC has struggled to justify the unbalanced impact of the cuts, which take the most from single parents, who are mainly women, at a time when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has pledged to increase the number of women in senior field positions.

The cuts will make it more difficult and more expensive for workers posted in the most difficult and dangerous locations to take leave to see their families and get medical checkups. The UN’s medical directors have said: “This is an area of great concern”’ because family leave and respite breaks “prevent stress-related symptoms and disorder in the long term.” Mental health problems already account for 25 per cent of UN sickness leave and 40 per cent of the costs.

An unusual aspect of the situation is the strong degree of agreement between UN staff unions and management. UN aid agency chiefs have warned that effective aid programmes and humanitarian interventions will be severely compromised without experienced, motivated staff to run them.

Further, the chiefs of all UN agencies including UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the UNHCR have jointly voiced their concern that the pay changes are “not fit for purpose” in terms of meeting the UN’s stated ambitions for a more diverse staff with more women in senior roles, or for increased “mobility” – moving staff quickly to danger zones where they are needed to save lives.

They warn that the cuts will make it harder to attract “the brightest and best,” and have a negative impact on staff motivation – when the personal risks for staff in danger zones already deter all but the most highly motivated.

We believe the cuts are penny wise, dollar foolish – saving some agencies 1 per cent of their budgets next year, but costing far more in the medium term when experienced aid managers, with years under the belt in the world’s most remote locations, leave and cannot be replaced.

If that happens, the UN won’t have much to celebrate when its 80th anniversary comes around.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Ian Richards
GENEVA, May 12 2015 (IPS)

On Apr. 20, this year, four of my colleagues tragically lost their lives in Northern Somalia, when an explosive device ripped through their minibus as they travelled back to their guesthouse.

Ian Richards. Credit: George Younes

It wasn’t the first, nor unfortunately will it be the last time that U.N. staff are killed in the line of duty.

But for an organisation turning 70 this October, it is an uncomfortable wakeup call, and a reminder to the world, that behind the walls of its gleaming, newly refurbished headquarters in New York, its modern conference rooms and news-grabbing resolutions, are a staff of 75,000 drawn from all quarters of the globe, many working in difficult and dangerous locations, some paying with their lives.

Much will be written about the U.N.’s 70th anniversary (even though the bulk of it was created more recently). But for staff, the focus isn’t so much on the past as on the way forward.

For the culmination of this year’s anniversary is a summit of world leaders in New York to agree targets that will guide our work for the next decade and a half.

Called the sustainable development goals, they promise, among other things to eradicate extreme poverty, fight climate change, prevent conflicts and protect those caught in the crossfire.

No sooner than the ink is dry, governments will turn their attention to how the U.N. can best achieve those goals.

As a representative of U.N. staff, I believe that most of my colleagues are capable, suitably qualified and up to the task.For many reasons, and despite its successes, it has become an organisation too scared of failure, overly centralised, ageing and unsuited to operating in conflicts where our blue flag is seen as a target rather than a shield.

However, I do have doubts as to whether the U.N., on its 70th anniversary, is the best place for it.

For many reasons, and despite its successes, it has become an organisation too scared of failure, overly centralised, ageing and unsuited to operating in conflicts where our blue flag is seen as a target rather than a shield.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon shortly enters his final 18 months in the job. I know he’s a keen reformer.

Under his leadership departments have been restructured, pay and benefits are being reviewed, a new policy will require staff to rotate more between headquarters and the field, and a new IT system promises to eliminate duplication in administrative support.

But I’m not convinced that these reforms will make it any easier for staff to help the organization achieve the sustainable development goals.

Here though are three simple ideas that will. And I believe that Ban Ki-moon can easily put them in place.

First, he should encourage his staff to take greater risks and become more entrepreneurial.

The innovations and ideas that will help reduce extreme poverty by 2030 may not yet have been invented. But as things stand, with an increasingly centralised and bureaucratic organisation, it’s probably no longer at the U.N. that they’ll see the light of day.

Let me tell you then about a former colleague called Jean Gurunlian. He joined the U.N. as a junior clerk and retired as a director. In that time he built a team that created an electronics customs system, now used at ports and border posts in almost half the countries of the world.

By using IT instead of paper forms, Asycuda, as the system is called, reduced corruption, got goods through customs faster and in doing so, contributed to the creation of tens if not hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in developing countries. It is also one of the U.N.’s biggest self-funded programmes.

That was in the 1980s and 1990s. No doubt Gurunlian faced his share of detractors back then when he presented the idea.

But I doubt today’s more centralised, rigidly budgeted and risk-averse U.N. could provide the right environment for the next generation of innovators – staff who are brimming with ideas, need space to try them out and forgiveness when ideas fail.

In any case, one thing is for sure: the staff rules now make it extremely difficult for junior clerks to rise through the ranks as Gurunlian did.

Second, if the U.N. is to support its staff in doing their work, it must provide a safer environment for those it deploys to the world’s most dangerous locations. Places such as Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, Mali, Syria, South Sudan and Yemen.

As the U.N.’s outgoing emergency relief coordinator, Valerie Amos, recently noted, “attacks on humanitarian workers have increased every year for more than a decade.” According to the U.N.’s own statistics, 100 staff and peacekeepers were killed in 2014.

Yet despite this and despite, for example, that Al Qaeda-linked al Shaabab has repeatedly attacked U.N. staff in Somalia and carried out attacks in Northern Somalia, our four colleagues died there last April.

The U.N. says it will “stay and deliver,” even in the most challenging environments when foreign embassies have evacuated their own staff.

But important as their work is, our colleagues can only assist those in the crossfire of conflict if they themselves get the protection they need.

We’ve been told that there is a tradeoff to be made between improving security for U.N. staff and being cost effective. Surely, cost should not be a factor when lives are at stake.

Third, the U.N. needs younger staff.

Only three percent of U.N. positions are at the entry-level grade called P-2. Worse, only 0.3 percent of staff are aged between 18 and 24. In contrast, the average age for joining the UN is 41.

Far from being structured like a pyramid, the U.N. looks more like a football. And as things stand, those graduating from university this year won’t even have joined the U.N. by 2030, the target date for the goals.

We will therefore miss out on the ideas and freshness that those straight out of university can bring to our organization.

This includes new methods of working, better use of technology, more effective ways to analyse and present information – everything to galvanise countries and other interests around the goals. That would be a shame.

So these then, in short, are three simple ideas that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon could put in place this year and that will enable the UN’s staff to help it meet the ambitious targets set by the sustainable development goals.

By any measure, they are a fitting and worthy 70th birthday present.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

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