Everyone is talking about corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Along with the World Health

Organization, which is the leading authority on scientific and public health information on the new
virus, the UN offices, field missions, agencies, funds and programmes are providing new information
in their spheres of expertise, as follow

Peacekeeping

Peacekeeping missions are putting in place a series of mitigation measures to promote the safety,
security and health of all UN personnel while maintaining continuity of operations.

More than 100 million people already rely on support from the United Nations’ humanitarian
agencies. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' (OCHA) top priority is to
ensure that we do the best we can to keep providing life-saving help for those people, while
supporting the wider system’s response to COVID-19.

Economic and Social Development

A global pandemic is a time of tough choices. The policy decisions taken now will shape the fate of
millions and define the future of nations. How to save people’s lives without destroying their
livelihoods? Where to allocate scarce resources? How to protect those who do not have the means to
protect themselves? UN DESA experts are working round the clock to help decision makers navigate
these tough choices and prevent the world from sliding into a dangerous depression.

Country Level Coordination

The United Nations Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG) is the group of 40 United Nations
entities working on development at the global, regional and country level. In countries, United
Nations Resident Coordinators are the designated representatives of the Secretary-General for
development. Under their leadership, United Nations country teams have mobilized to support
governments and partners on a decisive and coherent response to the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing
on national priority areas such as health and socio-economic protection to save livelihoods and lift
economies.

Environment

The transmission of diseases like COVID-19 between animals and humans threatens economic
development, animal and human well-being, and ecosystem integrity. The United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) supports global efforts to protect biodiversity, to put an end to
illegal trade in wildlife, to safeguard the handling of chemicals and waste and to promote economic
recovery plans that take nature and the climate emergency into account.
Water and Sanitation

As part of the COVID-19 response, UN-Water, the UN’s coordination mechanism on water and
sanitation, provides water and sanitation-related information from its Members and Partners. Page
updated as new information becomes available.

Educational Disruption and Response

UNESCO is providing immediate support to countries as they work to minimize the educational
disruption and facilitate the continuity of learning, especially for the most vulnerable.

Educational Disruption and Response

UNESCO is providing immediate support to countries as they work to minimize the educational
disruption and facilitate the continuity of learning, especially for the most vulnerable.

How to make this body more effective:

The United Nations faces rightful criticism over its handling of controversies involving sexual
exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers and its failure, until recently, to acknowledge its role in
the cholera outbreak in Haiti. Struggling UN peacekeeping missions, such as in South Sudan, face
huge challenges but also have failed to take effective action to protect civilians.

When scandals in the UN system are unearthed, rarely are senior officials held accountable. The
organization employs many outdated human resources, management, and budget practices that are
not reflective of a 21st century institution, and some corners of the United Nations still try to
silence whistleblowers or bury critical reports rather than resolve internal problems.

On top of all of this, many elements of the UN system and certainly many of its members still
harbor an anti-Israel bias that only delegitimizes and distracts the organization more broadly.

1) Make high-impact management, human resources, and accountability changes.

To most, these are not “sexy” topics. But certain administrative changes are critical if the United

Nations is to maximize its potential. For starters, how the organization fills its senior-most

positions needs serious attention. The United Nations can and should fill its senior ranks through

merit-based appointments, and it can do this in a way that achieves gender parity and a balance of

individuals from different regions. The organization should require that all Under- and Assistant-
Secretary-General level positions be advertised, and the job announcements should list the duties

and qualifications for the job and effectively increase the pool of qualified women candidates.

The United Nations also needs to do a lot more to improve its culture of accountability and ensure

that all UN staff adhere to the highest ethical standards and that wrong-doing is not tolerated;

even a small number of allegations of wrong-doing or retaliation against whistleblowers can

undermine all of the organization’s excellent work. One way to do this is to conduct independent

audits of agency and senior manager performance, and more closely tie promotions and

terminations with results.

In addition, more administrative functions should be moved away from expensive UN cities, such

as New York and Geneva, to less expensive locations. This would help address the United

Nations’ personnel costs in a significant way — costs that have ballooned over time to, by some

reports, account for at least 70 percent of the organization’s total assessed budget. And

completing the management and human resources reforms begun by Ban Ki-moon should be a

top priority, including seeing “Umoja” implementation through. (Umoja is the United Nations’

initiative to modernize its personnel, procurement, and financial systems.)

2) Transform the United Nations’ development and humanitarian assistance architectures.

The UN development system must reprioritize its work to focus on implementing the Sustainable

Development Goals within existing budget resources. As part of this effort, the United Nations

should eliminate duplication among its various entities, enhance partnerships with the private

sector and civil society, and improve transparency and accountability by publishing data and

performance results online.

The organization also must improve coherence among development and humanitarian assistance

efforts to respond more effectively to protracted and recurrent crises and enhance emergency

prevention and preparedness efforts. The world now has more forcibly displaced people than at

any time since the Second World War. Former Secretary-General Ban convened the first World

Humanitarian Summit last year to establish an ambitious reform agenda for creating a more

strategic and effective humanitarian response system to, among other objectives, address this

unprecedented displacement. The United Nations must lead in implementing this agenda, a key

element of which is the “Grand Bargain,” a voluntary set of commitments from a broad cross-

section of leading donors, UN agencies, and NGOs.

These commitments have the potential to fundamentally change the way in which the

international community responds to humanitarian crises by incentivizing cost efficiencies and

increased transparency that will allow more aid dollars to go directly to people in need. At the

same time, we must remember that two-thirds of the world’s displaced people are not refugees,

but rather internally displaced people within their own national borders.

The United Nations needs to sharpen its focus on this group, including by appointing a Special

Representative of the Secretary-General to advocate for their needs. But until UN member states

can look beyond tired tropes about national sovereignty, the United Nations will remain hampered

in its ability to address the needs of the more than 40 million people displaced in their own

countries by conflict and other crises.

3. Continue badly needed peacekeeping reforms.

There are over 100,000 UN peacekeepers deployed in uniform and thousands of civilian

personnel serving in 16 missions around the world. These brave men and women are on the

frontlines of protecting civilians and contributing to sustainable peace, often in austere

environments and with insufficient equipment and training. The United Nations and its member

states have not done enough to improve the design and capabilities of these operations.

The peacekeeping summit that President Obama co-hosted in 2015 generated pledges of over

50,000 new military, police, and enablers for these missions. The United Nations needs to deploy

these troops more urgently to missions based on need and quality control, swapping out units that

have underperformed or are not fit for where they are deployed. The United Nations also should

move more quickly to wind down operations that have outlived their usefulness, improve mission

assessment and planning, shorten the time it takes to deploy personnel and assets to the field, and

ensure the safety and security of UN mission personnel, including through adequate medical

services. Lastly, and perhaps most important, senior UN leadership in New York, mission leaders

in the field, and individual units need to be held accountable more uniformly for failure to carry

out their mandated tasks and for conduct and discipline issues, particularly sexual exploitation and

abuse of the very people UN peacekeepers are supposed to protect.

4. Strengthen the United Nations’ conflict prevention, mediation, and

peace building capabilities.

While UN peacekeeping missions are critical tools in the maintenance of

international peace and security, they are expensive and should not be treated as substitutes for

long-term solutions (as, unfortunately, some of them have become). The United Nations’ efforts

to prevent conflict through analysis and early warning, mediation, and peacebuilding are equally

important to global peace and security efforts.

Unfortunately, while the organization has attempted to bring greater coherence and resources to

these capabilities through its “sustaining peace” approach, the United Nations’ efforts in these

areas still are fragmented, understaffed, and underfunded. Efforts to address these deficiencies
over the years too often have been met with resistance by some member states who see funding in

support of these lines of effort as taking away from funding in support of development and other

needs, leading to stalemates in UN budget discussions that hamper the organization’s ability to be

effective.

Secretary-General Guterres’ announcement earlier this month that he will co-locate regional staff

from the United Nations’ Departments of Political Affairs and Peacekeeping and augmenting the

policy planning staff in his Executive Office are welcome changes that could produce immediate

results. But think tanks and outside experts have floated more expansive proposals for how greater

coherence and increased resources can be realized, such as by formally merging different UN

departments and providing more predictable funding for some of these efforts. All of these

proposals, and others, should be on the table as part of the high-level peace and security review

that Secretary-General Guterres announced.

5. Create a high-level UN coordinator for counterterrorism and countering violent extremism.

The United Nations has made strides over the past decade in ramping up its counterterrorism and

countering violent extremism work. But this has resulted in 37 entities across the UN system

focused on these issues, with no single focal point to coordinate activities, shift resources, or plan

strategically. The United Nations needs to create an Under-Secretary-General position to provide

dedicated leadership on coordinating and implementing the organization’s work to counter

terrorism and violent extremism. Making the UN system more efficient and effective on these

issues is critical to building member states’ capacities to counter today’s threats and prevent

future ones from emerging.

Like any great organization, the United Nations must continually analyze its performance and

make structural and operational changes to improve its results. As President Obama said during
his 2014 UN General Assembly address, the United States “welcome[s] the scrutiny of the world

— because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems

and make our union more perfect…and we are willing to criticize ourselves when we fall short.”

This sort of tough love approach also applies to the United Nations — an organization that is

more indispensable than ever, but one that also needs to address the significant challenges that are

preventing it from being even more effective.

I am proud of what this Administration has accomplished through the United Nations and broader

multilateral system over the past eight years, and passionate about the changes that this system

should make to become more fit for purpose in addressing tomorrow’s challenges. Even though

my time as Assistant Secretary is coming to an end, I look forward to remaining engaged in

conversations around these issues and to contributing to solutions.