http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48466
Suzanne Hoeksema interviews ROB VOS, head of the UN Development Policy and Analysis Division
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 (IPS) - The negative fallout from climate change, including drought, floods, melting glaciers, mass migration, and sea level rise, is being increasingly viewed as a potential security threat to nation states worldwide.
In a statement on Darfur, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon referred to climate change as one of the main causes of the violence taking place in the Sudanese province threatened by drought and desertification.
This view is shared by U.S. Senator John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and a vociferous advocate of mitigation measures for climate change.
However, in an interview with U.N. correspondent Suzanne Hoeksema, the director of DESA's Development Policy and Analysis Division, Rob Vos, says that such a direct link between cause and effect is very difficult to prove.
"Right now we are faced with devastating drought and famine in Eastern Africa", but the extent to which this draught will become a humanitarian disaster, he said, has to do with underlying political problems.
In its 'World Economic and Social Survey, 2009 (WESS) released last month, the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) warns of a high probability of destabilising political consequences as temperatures continue to rise.
Vos observes that within the United Nations, the Security Council and the U.S. government, there has been increasing attention to climate change and security issues.
The survey was released in advance of the climate change summit scheduled to take place in New York Sep. 22 in preparation for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009.
Vos says these climate negotiations will mainly try to reach an agreement on the universal reduction of emissions, but they do not fully address how that will be accomplished, or who will pay the bill.
Excerpts from the interview follow.
IPS: What is the link between climate change and political problems?
ROB VOS: Climate change and political problems reinforce each other, as in Somalia, where pirates and militias inhibit humanitarian aid supplies. Potential conflicts will arise where people leave their habitats and migrate to other places.
Some would say that the Darfur crisis was caused by climate change. Although this is hard to prove, it remains a truism that countries with underlying political and social risk factors will be more vulnerable to climate change.
IPS: How will the effects of climate change in Africa, for example, impact on security in industrialised nations?
RV: More drought in Africa will bring more Africans to Europe with the accompanying societal issues. Then, where people move, there will be conflicts. So we have to respond to the complexities of climate change strategically. Developing countries must be given an opportunity to grow to make themselves defensible to climate change.
IPS: How can the survey's recommendations be realised? Are growth and reduction of emissions not mutually exclusive?
RV: It is always difficult to predict the future. Yet importantly, what the survey attempts to show is that without development, the sensitivity to climate change of developing countries will increase. So both policies need to become part of each other. We have the knowledge and technology, but both are expensive and not easily accessible for developing countries.
First, we have to ensure that energy expertise becomes affordable and accessible, and second, we have to facilitate the actual transformation to durable forms of energy.
IPS: Providing knowledge and technology to developing countries alone is unlikely to mitigate climate change. What about political will and public awareness?
RV: Developing countries may say that it is not their responsibility to clean up the mess the developed countries have caused, and they have a point in that, but they also realise that they feel the consequences of climate change more severely than developed countries. Ignorance is not an option for them.
Countries such as China have realised that there is something to gain from the climate change industry. Soon they will be the main producer of solar panels. Clean energy should become an attractive form of energy, not a financial burden. But, it is true that we cannot force people nor governments: you can bring the horse to the water, but you cannot force it to drink.
IPS: Besides emission reduction, what can be done to avoid conflicts related to climate, for example, water wars?
RV: Here we have to think about water management, rural development, and other more radical demographic options such as government-led migration. This migration policy is certainly not always possible or desirable, but at some point we might need to think of these measurements.
The question is, what do we do with the people who live in unliveable areas? Do we try to fix the land or do we move the people? Governments of several groups of islands in the Oceania have begun talks with Australia and New Zealand about large-scale evacuations. Nowadays, we only evacuate for short time periods in cases of natural disasters.
It will all depend on governance. For example, people, farms and factories all need water for different purposes. What is needed is a common denominator. When water is used for a single purpose, such as drinking, cooperation may succeed. But when different groups have opposing interests, underlying conflicts can easily take root.
When scarcity is managed by some sort of community or government, conflicts are more likely to be managed peacefully.
(END/2009)
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Benefit fraud is a CRIME !
Following a FOXNEWS INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING :
France: Well-Paid U.N. Official Took French Welfare Payments in Fraud Case (Click here)
FRENCH AUTHORITIES SHOULD INVESTIGATE
AND GO TO THE BOTTOM
OF UN-DESA OFFICIAL
DEFRAUDING HOUSING BENEFITS IN PARIS
Friday, 11 September 2009
While H.E. Haiyan Qian preach ICT at GAID in Monterrey - her Division's website is a mess
What can the world leaders expect from H.E. Haiyan Qian and H.E. Sha Zukang, when they preached this week at GAID meeting about "UN Agenda on e-governance and its role in the current crisis to support the MDGs" ?
The Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) is an initiative created by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in 2006 to contribute to transforming the spirit and vision of WSIS into action promoting the use of ICT for the achievement of the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals.
So let's see how the UN's Department who preaches use of ICT to enhance transparency in governance around the world is doing for itself?
Here is the current WebSite of DPADM. DESA spend $78 million dollars a year for DPADM, for some staff seating down all day and doing nothing, or playing cards in their computers. How can the world expect DESA to lead by example when all data and info in DESA's own websites are OUTDATED ???!!!!
The Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) is an initiative created by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in 2006 to contribute to transforming the spirit and vision of WSIS into action promoting the use of ICT for the achievement of the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals.
So let's see how the UN's Department who preaches use of ICT to enhance transparency in governance around the world is doing for itself?
Here is the current WebSite of DPADM. DESA spend $78 million dollars a year for DPADM, for some staff seating down all day and doing nothing, or playing cards in their computers. How can the world expect DESA to lead by example when all data and info in DESA's own websites are OUTDATED ???!!!!
HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE
Peluso provided false testimony on UN/DESA letterhead about the whereabouts of Bruno Bastet to French Court
AS PUBLISHED IN FOXNEWS REPORTING:
FALSE TESTIMONY
TO FRENCH COURT
France: Well-Paid U.N. Official Took French Welfare Payments in Fraud Case
FALSE TESTIMONY
TO FRENCH COURT
ON WHEREABOUTS OF BRUNO BASTET
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Pelluso Out, Italian Clan trying to reinvent itself, while DESA is in search of new ASG
Sources from 23rd floor indicate that the days of Catherine Pelluso in DESA are coming to an end soon. Somehow, someone have managed to "arrange" a quick package for Ms. Pelluso and she's on the way out.
But don't count her out as yet, until her very last minute the Italian clan will try to use Pelluso to reinvent "the italian way" inside DESA.
Same sources indicate that scandal hit - DPADM is about to get a new Italian as head of Knowledge Management Branch, to replace Haiyan Qian who was selected early this year to replace the outgoing disgraced chief of DPADM Guido Bertucci. This fellow who has desperately been in the market since Patrizio Civili left town, is trying to impose himself as the new Mr. IT (Information Technology) in DESA. Haiyan seem to be very close to signing the offer. After substantial losses, the italians are trying to reconstitute themselves and "improve" their tarnished image from latest corruption stories. It seems that no one at DESA's cupola is able to identify any current staff of Knowledge Management Branch (KMB) able and capable to lead the branch, despite many of them being there for years, and running it the last 12 months when Haiyan wasn't there.
On another note, Sha Zukang is quietly looking for a replacement to Jomo Kwame. With Thomas Stelzer staying more in Vienna than New York, maybe will have a new leadership soon. Will see how this would go.
But don't count her out as yet, until her very last minute the Italian clan will try to use Pelluso to reinvent "the italian way" inside DESA.
Same sources indicate that scandal hit - DPADM is about to get a new Italian as head of Knowledge Management Branch, to replace Haiyan Qian who was selected early this year to replace the outgoing disgraced chief of DPADM Guido Bertucci. This fellow who has desperately been in the market since Patrizio Civili left town, is trying to impose himself as the new Mr. IT (Information Technology) in DESA. Haiyan seem to be very close to signing the offer. After substantial losses, the italians are trying to reconstitute themselves and "improve" their tarnished image from latest corruption stories. It seems that no one at DESA's cupola is able to identify any current staff of Knowledge Management Branch (KMB) able and capable to lead the branch, despite many of them being there for years, and running it the last 12 months when Haiyan wasn't there.
On another note, Sha Zukang is quietly looking for a replacement to Jomo Kwame. With Thomas Stelzer staying more in Vienna than New York, maybe will have a new leadership soon. Will see how this would go.
GOOD NEWS FROM DESA: World Economic and Social Survey 2009: Promoting Development, Saving the Planet
The Guatemala Times
The World Economic and Social Survey will be available today on the DESA website, along with a series of related Policy Briefs drawing from the report.
The separation of the climate change and development agendas has distorted the global debate on the two biggest policy challenges facing the international community. According to the World Economic and Social Survey 2009, an integrated approach based on the concept of sustainable development is urgently needed.
• The Survey argues that mitigation and adaptation efforts can move forward effectively only if they are part of a consistent development strategy built around an investment-led push on to low-carbon, high-growth pathways.
• It warns that the adjustments this will involve must not push poorer countries and communities further down the development ladder, or leave them saddled with unmanageable debts, but should instead strengthen their resilience to external shocks, both climatic and economic.
• While acknowledging that a variety of market and non-market institutional mechanisms will be needed if advances are to be made along those paths, the Survey contends that the public sector must assume a much more prominent role, and that stronger developmental States must take action to mobilize public finances and build appropriate technological capacities.
• To gain traction, this potentially win-win strategy requires the international community to step up to the plate with multilateral financing on a much larger scale than has been forthcoming to date, and with new approaches to transferring technology from rich to poor countries. The report offers various suggestions to ensure that the available financing matches the challenges at hand.
For further information, please contact Robert Vos ( vos@un.org ), Richard Kozul-Wright ( kozul-wright@un.org ), Imran Ahmad ( ahmad33@un.org ) of the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs.
UN proposes new Marshall Plan
A United Nations report launched yesterday recommends a new Marshall Plan of more than $500 billion per year, or one percent of global output, to help developing countries ease the impact of global warming and adjust to its effects while continuing on a path of economic growth.
“The science is clear. We need to drastically lower greenhouse gas emissions to protect the planet and avoid dangerous temperature rises globally,” stressed Rob Vos, a Director of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).
“If we do not significantly reduce emissions the damage to poor countries as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product) will be up to more than 10 times greater than in the United States and most other developed countries,” Vos told reporters in New York at the launch of the 2009 World Economic and Social Survey: Promoting Development, Saving the Planet.
Vos noted that for every rise of one degree in global temperature, the annual average growth in developing countries drops between two and three percentage points with little impact on advanced countries.
However, to satisfy development needs, energy demands will have to rise in developing countries, posing a challenge in how to combine the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with economic objectives.
“To do this we will need huge adjustments in developed, but in particular developing countries,” Vos said.
“The transformation of energy services will be the key. This will have to go hand-in-hand with large-scale interrelated investments in order to address simultaneously the climate change and development goals.” he said.
The World Economic and Social Survey suggests that market solutions, including the development of a carbon market, through “cap and trade” mechanisms or taxation schemes in developed countries, are not the solution for developing countries.
Rather, it recommends a combination of large-scale investments and active government policy interventions for developing countries.
Among the possible multilateral measures in support of a global investment program set out in the report is the creation of a global clean energy fund, a global feed-in tariff regime in support of renewable energy sources, a climate technology program and a more balanced intellectual property regime for aiding the transfer of clean energy technology.
“We are suggesting that we need a globally funded public investment program to allow developing countries to engage both in cleaner generation of energy and still meet their development objectives,” Vos said.
As UN Asks for $500 Billion for Climate Change, Few Details Given, Indigenous REDD Lined
By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, September 1 -- As the UN released a report on climate change that largely absolved China for its emissions while calling on Western countries to pony up $500 billion for the developing world's adaptation to global warming, skeptics wondered if this was science or politics? The report, entitled "Promoting Development, Saving the Planet" and issued by the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs, was launched, in UN parlance, at UN Headquarters by Rob Vos and a series of slides. Inner City Press asked Vos, who would administer the $500 billion? Vos said that decision would be made later -- change minds and get the money first. Video here, from Minute 47:22.
Afterwards, a true cynic wonder if the fact that DESA is headed by Sha Zukang of China had anything to do with the striking absolution of that country, and of India. It's as if different parts of the UN are ceded to different political interests. Peacekeeping is given to the West, hence the presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and U.S. interests like Haiti. DESA and UNCTAD and other such agencies are given over to the developing world. $500 billion: but who's going to pay it?
Meanwhile, there is a problem, to be sure. Monday night, the Ambassador of a Pacific island state told Inner City Press that while he viewed Ban Ki-moon's upcoming September 22 climate change event as hype, parts of his country face flooding and submersion, and salt water is seeping into the soil like a sponge, cutting food production. If the $500 billion would go to states like this, or to the impact farmers, that would be fine. Which is why the proposal shouldn't have been made without more specifics.
UN's Vos and slides - nice guy, more more specifics needed
Inner City Press asked the UN's head of the Forum on Forests about problems between indigenous communities and the vaunted "REDD" program. She acknowledged that there had been issues, while laying these off on the World Bank. But now, she said, indigenous people have a seat at the table, right next to governments. Video from here.
That's not what people in Indonesia, Guyana and Panamaare saying. Watch this site.
Some Good News From DESA: - U.N. Reports on Developing Nations’ Energy Needs
UNITED NATIONS — It will cost between $500 billion and $600 billion every year for the next 10 years to allow developing nations to grow using renewable energy resources, instead of relying on dirty fuels that worsen global warming, according to a United Nations report released Tuesday.
That astronomical estimate, far higher than any previously suggested by the United Nations, comes at a time when developed and developing nations are still deeply divided over who bears the responsibility for shouldering the expense of deploying cleaner energy resources, much less what the actual amount might be.
The issue of who will foot the bill remains one of the significant hurdles to reaching a global agreement on combating climate change by December in Copenhagen. Much of the focus in the talks has also been on significant emissions cuts.
“We need a public investment program to drive this shift into cleaner energy resources,” said Rob Vos, the director of development policy in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which produced the report, comparing it to the Marshall Plan, through which the United States rebuilt European economies after World War II. “The major obstacle is to convince political leaders and their constituencies to go in that direction.”
Developing nations want a commitment from the developed world of financial support for reducing current and future emissions, but no concrete commitments have been forthcoming. At the summit meeting of African Union leaders this week in Tripoli, Libya, members agreed to ask the industrialized world for $67 billion annually, including compensation for the consequences of global warming it created, according to news reports.
The developed world, by contrast, wants a commitment to reduce emissions up front, suggesting that financial support will follow. The United States Senate is supposed to address the issue by the end of September, while the European Union expects to come up with a proposed financial package in October.
Senior United Nations officials say they hope that a special summit meeting on climate change, with about 100 world leaders expected to attend on Sept. 22, the day before the United Nations General Assembly begins, will help break the impasse.
Numbers bandied about previously were in the $100 billion range, with leaders like Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain suggesting a combination of government and private money. “The initial cost and the initial investment to put emissions on a sustainable path are large; no one knows exactly what the cost is,” said Mark Kenber, policy director at The Climate Group, a nonprofit organization focused on combating climate change.
But the new United Nations report suggests that adapting to the effects of global warming, lowering future emissions and growing economically all need to be addressed through a global fund covering at least some of the cost from 2010 to 2020. The figure starting at $500 billion is the cost of building the infrastructure needed in the developing world, including in giants like India and China, to meet their energy needs using renewable resources like wind and solar.
That sum represents roughly 1 percent of the annual global economic output, and it is smaller than the total amount committed under the various national economic stimulus packages, Mr. Vos noted. Only about $21 billion has been committed to combating climate change, he said. One way to generate the money might be through a “global tax” on carbon emissions of about $50 per ton, the report said, which would raise about $500 billion.
Experts said that a global tax might seem like an ideal solution on an academic level, but that it would be a nearly impossible sell in the real world. Still, the main strength of trying to get the world on the same page in terms of how to fight climate change is that it would reduce costs for everybody, Mr. Kenber said.
SOME GOOD NEWS: If all divisions in DESA were as DPAD
DESA is not only about scandals. We do have shining stars as well. One such Division is the Development Policy and Analysis, chaired by Rob Vos.
If all other Divisions were like DPAD - things would have been different in DESA.
Maybe Sha Zukang should take under consideration and replace Jomo Khame with Rob Vos. Only than maybe we can see some real substantial changes in our Department.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
American people have enough of corrupt U.N. officials, 21 Thousand speak out in one day
Our efforts to highlight some of the worst offenders in the United Nations, who have broken the U.N. rules, mismanaged our funds and corrupted and distorted the U.N. ethics and professionalism, are now capturing the attention of the american taxpayers.
21,287 voted (96%) to say NO to United States Government bailing out corrupt and failed U.N. programmes and projects.
We call on Ban Ki-moon and Sha Zukang to hear the voices of the world constituencies and the taxpayers who pay for them and United Nations.
OUR ORGANIZATION DESERVES BETTER.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT RIGHT VERSUS LEFT MR SHA ZUKANG
THIS IS RIGHT VERSUS WRONG
MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD -- CAST YOUR VOTE HERE
Should the U.S. bail a U.N. tech project that is tens of millions of dollars over budget?
Total Votes: 22,262
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Sha Zukang and Catherine Pelluso failed to held responsible Bastet for not attending to his outside legal/financial obligations
Following a FOXNEWS REPORT INVESTIGATION - and after reading today the Report of our Dear Leader Bank ki-moon on:- "Practice of the Secretary General in disciplinary matters and possible criminal behavior, 1 July 2008 to June 2009" (A/64/269).
It amazing to see the cases of established misconduct and/or criminal behavior and the respective disciplinary/legal actions taken from our Dear Leader.
Let us mention here some of them:
Theft/misappropriation34. A staff member attempted to steal a chair from the Organization. Disposition: loss of one step in grade and a two-year deferment for a within-grade increment after waiver of referral to a Joint Disciplinary Committee.35. A staff member forged the signature of his supervisor in attempting to steal three barrels of fuel belonging to the Organization. Disposition: summary dismissal.36. A staff member attempted to steal eight jerry cans filled with diesel fuel belonging to the Organization. Disposition: separation from service after advice of a Joint Disciplinary Committee.
Other53. A staff member failed to honour his private legal obligations by neglecting to pay a creditor and failing to provide information to the Secretary-General concerning the fulfilment of his private financial obligations when specifically requested to do so. Disposition: written censure after advice of a Joint Disciplinary Committee.59. A staff member failed to honour private legal obligations. Disposition: written censure after advice of a Joint Disciplinary Committee.65. A staff member failed to honour private legal obligations when requested to do so. Disposition: a written censure after advice of a Joint Disciplinary Committee.
From more than a year Mr. Bastet was involved, attended and participated in court proceedings in France (and elsewhere) with regard to having failed to honor his parental obligations towards his own biological son, providing him with financial support (dependent subsidy allowance).
At the same time, as reported from FOXNEWS, Bastet was receiving illegally rental subsidy and dependency allowances registered as a poor person (without appropriate income) from French Authorities back in France, while he was fully employed from the United Nations - Department of Economic and Social Affairs - Division of Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM).
As staff members of the United Nations we would like to know:
How and when did our internal system of check and balances (DESA-EO) new about Bastet ? Why the system failed to assure transparency and held Mr. Bastet accountable to his outside legal and financial responsibilities ?
If Ban Ki-moon (our dear leader) can held other UN staff responsible for not "honoring their private legal/financial obligations to third parties", how come did DESA's Executive Office (Catherine Pelluso) failed to take actions and protect organization's reputation in this case?
How could DESA's Executive Office provide with false information a French Court System and falsely declare that Bastet was living in Paris while he is for the past 5 years permanently stations in New York ?
Who signed the letter to French Courts and is DESA holding anyone responsible for it?
How can DESA afford to have Mr. Bastet assigned to various advisory positions and allow him to advise government and leaders out-there on Ethics and Public Administration Professionalism ?
Meanwhile today there are rumors that Bastet is being offer another job inside DESA at another Branch.
Is this the change Sha Zukang promised two years ago ? You all remember when he said " NO MORE SCANDALS " !!!
Mammoth U.N. Tech Overhaul: Over Budget and Behind Schedule
Tuesday , September 01, 2009
By George Russell
Those tidings are contained in a 53-page draft report on the project obtained by FOX News, which was prepared on behalf of a steering committee of top U.N. bureaucrats overseeing the information technology overhaul. The head of the committee is Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Under Secretary General for Management, Angela Kane.
The technology system described in the report is intended to unify and coordinate — as well as redefine — jobs and functions across the global secretariat, including its fast-expanding peacekeeping efforts, which have grown in cost from $1 billion to $8 billion annually in just the last five or so years.
Yet despite the unappetizing revelations about the cost and timing of the technology project-named Umoja, or "unity" in Swahili — the bureaucrats in charge of the scheme remain relentlessly upbeat about the final outcome.
MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD -- CAST YOUR VOTE HERE
Should the U.S. bail a U.N. tech project that is tens of millions of dollars over budget?
This is not a scientific poll.
They dub it a "once-in-a-generation chance to equip the Organization with twenty-first century practices, tools, training and technology," in order to "enable a more streamlined, cost effective, agile and accountable United Nations."
"Umoja is more than a project," the report declares. "It is a movement of continuous administrative report and improvement."
The bureaucrats claim that by the time their project is concluded in 2012 it will be back on schedule, and will pay for itself in cost efficiencies and other savings in just two years' time after it is operable and "stabilized." Their report offers little evidence beyond sweeping generalities, however, of how those efficiencies will be achieved.
And by then, the report says, the technology upgrade will have cost a staggering $337 million, or about $50.4 million more than was planned when the scheme was approved about a year and a half ago.
Even that cost-overrun is considerably understated. The original $286.6 million price tag for the Umoja information technology project, known as an enterprise resource system, or ERP, included $37.2 million worth of funding over and above the expected cost, or roughly 15 percent, for "contingencies" In effect, the report projects that the worst-case over-run will be exceeded by 135 percent.
There is a new 15percent budget line for "contingencies" in the $337 million total for Umoja revealed in the latest draft report, which the authors promise that U.N. bureaucrats will flag to the General Assembly as it is spent. But the "contingency" part of the price tag is considerably lower than the high range of 25 percent of the overall cost that the report says was recommended as a possibility by non-U.N. sources.
Ironically enough, the report was prepared, its authors say, in response to a General Assembly request in 2008 to update the business plan for the ERP, and provide options for a reduced ERP package at a lower cost than originally budgeted. The draft report offers up such packages, but only as interim steps toward full rollout of the system.
Click here to read the draft report.
Along the way, the draft report offers some fascinating insights into the process of cost inflation within the U.N., at least on major projects like the ERP — the same cost inflation that has driven up the cost of the U.N.'s headquarters renovation, now underway, from an estimated $800 million in 1999 to the current-and not finalized — $1.88 billion.
The Umoja draft report also pulls back the curtain slightly on the near-Paleolithic state of outdated and chaotic technology and management practices within the sprawling U.N. Secretariat today.
Among other things, the report says in a footnote that the new ERP system will replace "several hundred" of the "existing 1400+" information systems in use at the U.N. — which would leave roughly 1,000 or so still out there.
Elsewhere, the report says many of the existing electronic systems are only used to back up hand-entered paper systems, which employees trust more than their electronic tools. "Paper documents are usually the source of trusted information," the report confides, adding that at the U.N. "we often have several versions of 'the truth.'"
But above all, the draft report shows that the U.N. is continuing to shower fearsome amounts of money on complicated technological fixes for its management problems, which even before the latest ERP effort had reached runaway proportions. The earlier technology fixes apparently have not achieved much U.N. unity or management efficiency.
According to a 2005 report by the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU), a small, independent branch of the General Assembly that looks at issues across the sprawling array of U.N. funds, programs and agencies worldwide, the global organization-even then — had spent more than $1 billion on various information management systems over the previous decade.
"The United Nations system's investment in ICT [Information and Communications Technologies] is growing at a faster rate than the operating budgets of most United Nations organizations, or than worldwide inflation," the JIU observed, while noting that the U.N. system still had not managed to create even a common payroll system for the tens of thousands of employees worldwide.
Umoja is not intended to solve the problems of the entire disparate U.N. system, just of the U.N. Secretariat — and according to the draft report authors, it would result in "efficiency and productivity gains in the order of 4 to 7 percent of the Organization's entire annual spend."
The draft report's description of how it calculated those savings, however, is sometimes puzzling — starting with the fact that, using the table of dollar values for the 4 percent to 7percent savings provided on page 10 of the report, the total "annual spend" of the U.N. they describe would seem to wobble between $11.03 billion and $11.85 billion, an $800 million difference.
Among other things, the report claims that Umoja's automated processes would "drastically reduce the 207-day average time between the creation of a requisition for goods and the creation of a purchase order" in the Secretariat's procurement system — a claim that seems unarguable. The report says that there would be $32 million to $64 million of process efficiency gains" as a result.
But the report also says that "renegotiating contracts for more favorable pricing based on better usage and performance information" will yield cost savings of $76 million to $117 million, without providing hard details about how the reduction in overcharging will be achieved, or whether contracts can successfully be renegotiated on that basis.
"Better forecasting for goods required" could save $56 million to $70 million, the Umoja document claims. But the report also says that a "one-time savings of $18 million to $27 million" would come from a reduction of inventory, followed by "additional benefits of reduced carrying costs" — which sounds like more of the previous $76 million to $117 million saving.
When it comes to U.N. travel, the report describes a horror story, in which simply processing travel claims on expense accounts each year currently takes up the equivalent of 60 full time employees working full-time. Fixing that would save $21 million to $34 million a year, the report says. The same goes for other accounting exercises. Closing the U.N. Secretariat's year-end accounts "currently involves 40,000 working hours and takes three months." The new system would cut that in half, the report says.
Some projected savings, however, appear bizarre. One example: "Umoja would also generate opportunities for the United Nations to generate income with ... sales of publications, postage stamps and gift items." Expected revenue: $11 million to $21 million. No explanation is provided of how that would happen. The U.N. postal system has been a scandal-tainted perennial money loser.
When it comes to Umoja's own ballooning costs, however, the high tech project looks less like a revolutionary reform and more like a return to the U.N.'s bad old days, especially when compared to the original budget for the tech overhaul put forward last year.
The original plan for the project called for 44 "core" or full-time staffers to manage the Umjoa installation and roll-out. The new draft report bluntly declared the project "could not possibly be executed" without 36 additional bodies. Cost: $32.4 million. Another $18.1 million would be required to replace staff brought in from other parts of the U.N. to help out along the way.
Even though the staffing climbs to 80, the revised Umoja budget includes office rental for 236 people ($6.7 million) with "minor alterations" to the office space ($4.2 million).
The original budget for the tech overhaul had a minimal expense line for travel. That's changed: now the budget calls for "a total of 1,285 trips by the ERP team, subject-matter-experts and corporate consultants," at an average air ticket cost of $6,000, plus $202 "terminal expenses," plus $5,000 for per diem expenses, "with each trip is [sic] estimated to cost $11,202/person."
Total cost: $14.4 million.
The draft report authors claim that Umoja's timetable is "slightly off" its previously announced schedule because the General Assembly only provided $20 million in initial funding, when the Secretariat had asked for $43 million in 2008-2009 for the design of the startup, which was supposed to allow building to start on January 15, 2010.
Now that is likely to begin after the first "three or four" months of 2010, though the report authors insist that "excellent progress" on the overall project will have been made by the end of this year.
Among other things, after what it calls a "comprehensive and competitive bidding process," the Umoja team has chosen a software provider for Umoja: SAP. But negotiations on how to proceed with the software contracts have barely begun, the report says.
The draft report ends with a warning that the technical overhaul involved in Umoja must be accompanied by an overhaul of a wide variety of U.N. rules and regulations, amounting to an entire redefinition of how work is done at the U.N., and by a total restructuring, in effect, of the unwieldy organization. There is no cost attached to that full-scale upheaval — and no sense that the extraordinary reorganization of personnel might cause additional delays.
How the General Assembly, and its often skeptical budget committees, will react to the ballooning price tag for Umoja is not known. The Assembly does not convene until mid-September.
George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.
Some of American Reaction to US Government bailing out the United Nations
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Under no circumstances should we bail out the UN for anything. In fact we need to cancel the lease on the UN Headquarters building and obligate them to request asylum in some other country. Let someone else have the pleasure for a while.