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Deputy Executive Director Kul Gautum on the draft MTSP 2006-2009 at the June Annual Session of the Executive Board

Deputy Executive Director Kul Gautum:

Mr President,
Distinguished Delegates,

It is my pleasure to introduce to you the Draft UNICEF Medium Term Strategic Plan for the period 2006-2009. We have entitled it: Investing in Children: the UNICEF contribution to poverty reduction and the Millennium Agenda.

To keep it simple, our Executive Director likes to call it the UNICEF business plan to contribute to the Millennium Development Goals.

We are presenting this plan to you as a draft for discussion. Your comments and guidance at this Annual Session of the Board will help us to finalize and submit a much shorter and sharper version of the Plan for the Board’s consideration and approval at your next regular session in September.

As you know, we have already had extensive consultations with Board members and other partners in preparing the present draft. I hope all of you will see your views and inputs reflected, in some form, in the present draft.

But in trying to be inclusive and comprehensive, the document has become a bit too long. So let me try to summarize it for you.

I will do so in 3 parts. First, I will talk about what UNICEF hopes to achieve. Second, I will talk about how UNICEF proposes to work. And last but not least, I will talk about the resources UNICEF will need to do its job.

Mr. President,

What will UNICEF do in the coming four years?

UNICEF’s work is, of course, guided by the cumulative decisions of this Executive Board over the years. UNICEF’s Mission Statement, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Millennium Declaration and its Goals, and the outcome of the UN General Assembly’s Special Session on Children will continue to provide the basis for UNICEF’s work.

These global policies, norms and goals are then carefully matched with the needs and priorities of developing countries in determining the nature of UNICEF-supported programmes.

In the coming 4 years from 2006 to 2009, we propose to organize UNICEF’s work in 5 key areas – each aimed at contributing to one or more of the Millennium goals and commitments.

The first area is Young Child Survival and Development. This will contribute extensively to MDG 4 on reducing child mortality. It will support essential health, nutrition, water and sanitation interventions, and will support families and communities in providing young child and maternal care.

This focus area will also contribute to several other MDGs, including:

MDG 1 on reducing poverty and especially, malnutrition;
MDG 5 on reducing maternal mortality, and support for safe motherhood, including through joint programming with our sister agencies UNFPA and WHO;
MDG 6 on prevention and control of Malaria - still the biggest killer of children in Africa; and
MDG 7 on the environment, through UNICEF support for safe water and sanitation.

Our work in Young Child Survival and Development will include support to increased and sustained immunization coverage and services.

It will support prevention and control of malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and other major child killers. Ante-natal care of pregnant women, neonatal care of the newborn; Vitamin A prophylaxis; food fortification and anaemia control will be other major activities.

UNICEF will also support the improvement of family and community care practices for young child survival, growth and development - with a focus on breastfeeding, growth promotion and cognitive development.

We will support increased access to safe water supply and basic sanitation and hygiene at homes, in schools and in communities.

We hope to achieve the eradication of polio and guinea worm disease during this plan period.

And we will aim to achieve full implementation of UNICEF’s Core Commitments for Children in health, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene in declared Emergencies.

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The second area of cooperation will be Basic Education and Gender Equality.  This will contribute both to MDG 2 - achieving universal primary education - and MDG 3 - gender equality in basic education.

We will aim to increase developmental readiness for school, especially among marginalized children. We will support improvement in access, retention, completion, and quality of education, especially for girls, and for children from deprived communities.

This area will also include support for water and hygiene education in schools, including separate latrines for boys and girls, to help promote a child-friendly and conducive environment for learning.

Special efforts will be made to safeguard the education system against threats such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

UNICEF will continue to provide effective leadership to the UN Girls’ Education Initiative.

Another key objective will be to ensure continuing access to education in emergency situations, as we have done with “back to school programmes” and “school in a box”.

While the title of this Focus Area includes the term “Gender Equality” as a contribution to MDG 3, this is not meant to imply that UNICEF cares about gender equality only in education. UNICEF is committed to gender equality in all aspects of its work.

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Our third Focus Area will be HIV/AIDS and Children. This will be UNICEF’s contribution to MDG 6.

UNICEF is an active co-sponsor of UNAIDS. We propose to take a leadership position in the prevention of HIV infection among children and adolescents and in providing increased care and services for children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS.

More specifically, we aim to support programmes to:

- Reduce paediatric HIV infections, including through PMTCT plus, and working with partners to increase the proportion of HIV-positive women and children receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS.

- Increase the proportion of children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS who receive quality family, community and government support; and to

- Reduce the risks and vulnerability of adolescents to HIV/AIDS by increasing access to and use of gender sensitive information, skills and services.

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The next focus area is Child Protection. It constitutes UNICEF’s response to the Millennium Declaration and its emphasis on the protection of vulnerable groups and issues related to violations of human rights and child rights as a result of violence, abuse, exploitation and discrimination.

It also addresses the commitments contained in the World Fit for Children Plan of Action to help create a protective environment around vulnerable children, including children affected by conflict and humanitarian crisis.

In this area, UNICEF will work with our partners to:

-  Increase awareness of child protection issues and influence national decisions;

- Ensure effective legislation and enforcement systems to protect children from all forms of abuse, neglect, exploitation and violence,

- Help eliminate the worst forms of child labour; sexual exploitation and trafficking of children;

- Improve juvenile justice systems to better serve and protect children;

- Protect children from the impact of armed conflict and natural disasters; and

- Reduce the number of children separated from families, and strengthen national capacity to provide protective family or alternative care for children without families.

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The fifth and last focus area deals with policy advocacy, partnership and participation.

We have called it, First Call for Children in Policies, Laws and Budgets. It constitutes UNICEF’s response to MDG 8, and at the same time it also contributes to MDG 1.

Some delegates might recall that the principle of a First Call for Children was invoked at the historic 1990 World Summit for Children. It was meant to ensure that the essential needs of children should be given high priority in the allocation of resources in bad times as well as good, at national, international and family levels.

UNICEF will try to do that by influencing policies, laws and budgets, among other instruments. Our work will aim to put children and the reduction of child poverty at the centre of socio-economic policy agendas based on evidence and analysis.

This will involve more systematic engagement of UNICEF, together with our UN partners, in Poverty Reduction Strategies, SWAps, emergency preparedness and decision-making on budgets and legislation.

It will involve more aggressive leveraging of resources for children, including through public-private partnerships, alliances with civil society, and international financial institutions.

A special kind of partnership UNICEF offers is procurement services for key commodities for children – such as vaccines, essential drugs, bednets, ARVs, and school supplies to help accelerate and attain child-specific MDGs.

UNICEF work in this area will generate and support:

- gender-disaggregated data on children and women to inform strategic decision-making;

- research and policy analysis on critical issues affecting children and women, including by our Innocenti Research Centre in Florence;

- advocacy based on evidence - for policy dialogue and leveraging of resources for children;

- and last but not the least, the participation of children and young people in decision-making on matters concerning their lives, in accordance with their evolving capacities.

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Mr. President, Distinguished Delegates,

That is a summary of what UNICEF will do in the next 4 years. For those interested in getting to know further details of specific results, targets, indicators and interventions in each of these areas, I would refer you to the results matrices annexed to the document.

Let me now turn to how UNICEF will work, what approaches it will follow and what kind of philosophy it will be guided by.

UNICEF follows a strong country programme approach in which the priorities outlined in its global business plan provide a useful framework, but not a blueprint for every country.

What UNICEF will do in individual countries depends on the unique situation of each country – its national priorities, its national capacity, the role of other partners, and UNICEF’s comparative advantage in that country.

Support for national capacity building for sustained and sustainable achievement of the child-specific MDGs and protection of child rights will be the hallmark of UNICEF programming.

The needs and rights of children cannot always be compartmentalized in discreet sectors. They cut across many sectors. UNICEF will therefore generally follow a multi-sectoral approach in which education programmes yield health benefits, improved nutrition leads to better learning achievement, child protection measures safeguard against HIV/AIDS, and so forth.

UNICEF cooperation is therefore aimed at what is known as ensuring human security – i.e. protecting children and vulnerable groups from poverty, disease, illiteracy, malnutrition and violation of their human rights to live with dignity.

Indeed, the rights-based approach, and gender equality, are our key “foundation strategies” which apply to the entire range of UNICEF’s work as stipulated in our mission statement.

We have provided additional details of the main components of the Human Rights-based approach – such as reaching the most marginalized children, strengthening family and national capacities, promoting children’s and youth participation and tackling discrimination.

The Plan also emphasizes that in all Focus Areas, UNICEF will provide evidence and analysis of the situation of children and women; and will advocate for policies and support programmes that contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

We have also sought to clarify in detail how UNICEF’s Core Commitments to Children in Emergencies are systematically mainstreamed in each of the proposed Focus Areas of the Plan – with specific targets and results which will be planned for and monitored.  We have also discussed how UNICEF will gear up internally and retain its capacity for effective response to children in humanitarian crises.

In the forthcoming Plan period UNICEF seeks to actively participate in and contribute to joint programming with our sister UN agencies and other partners.

The common platform of MDGs and the many UN reform initiatives led by our Secretary-General, refined by the UN Development Group and adapted to the realities of each country by the UN country team, provide the basis for such programming.

Finally, UNICEF seeks to be a learning organization in which feedback from research, monitoring and evaluation is used for course correction and refinement of our programmes and strategies.

You will find how UNICEF will do this reflected in annex 2 of the document that sketches out our “Integrated Monitoring and Evaluation Framework”.

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Distinguished Delegates,

Let me now turn to the last segment of my presentation – on the resources UNICEF will need to mobilize for these ambitious tasks.

In the document we discuss at length how UNICEF plans to organize and mobilize its internal capacities, and how we can improve the efficiency of our operations and the use of our resources, to support the delivery of results for children in both regular and emergency situations.

UNICEF will continue to strive for excellence in our management and operations.  We are committed to ensuring that all our staff have the necessary skills – as well as the supply, information, finance and administrative systems – required to fulfil UNICEF’s role at the global, regional and country levels, including in offices operating under emergency environments.

In each of the main operations areas, we seek to establish performance targets, link investment activities to these targets and to monitor Key Performance Indicators at global, regional and country levels.

Previous Executive Board sessions have noted that the gap between core and non-core resources in UNICEF has widened and that concerted efforts are needed to change this trend.  We will work closely with our UN partners to reduce transaction costs and streamline operational procedures to maximize the impact of available resources for children.

We hope that our donors will appreciate these efforts, and respond generously to the needs of children, and the proven capacity of UNICEF to continue to implement programmes effectively.

If I may say, perhaps a little immodestly, the programmes and priorities of no other UN agency match so perfectly, in depth and breadth, with the Millennium Development Goals as do those of UNICEF.

And therefore, in this year of renewed commitment to MDGs, and on behalf of the nearly 2 billion children of developing countries, we nurture every hope, and expectation, that part of the increased financing for development will flow through UNICEF.

In addition to increasing Regular Resources, we will further encourage Thematic contributions during the next MTSP period to allow for longer-term planning, reduced transaction costs and better achievement of results.

We seek to further adapt and expand the scope of thematic funding during the new MTSP period, based on our experience so far.

In the chapter on fund raising strategy and targets, we have outlined our hopes for diversifying the funding base further with a projected annual growth rate in RR of 3% next year and 4% starting in 2007.

We believe that this is a conservative projection and hope that actual growth will exceed this projection, given the momentum for increased ODA among donors following their Monterrey commitments.

On the investment and expenditure side, UNICEF will continue to accord the highest priority for allocation of regular resources to sub-Saharan Africa and the Least Developed Countries. But given the relatively shrinking size of RR compared to OR, our ability to ensure that these countries receive similar priority in total resources becomes increasingly problematic. Hence our continuing appeal for increased RR contribution.

Stagnant RR also impacts negatively on UNICEF’s ability to make a meaningful contribution in middle income countries with fixed and modest financial allocation, such as those in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

In terms of sectoral allocation, UNICEF will aim to maintain throughout the 2006-2009 period a Regular Resources expenditure share for the Young Child Survival and Development Focus area that is comparable to the combined shares for the ECD and Immunization Plus priorities of the current plan period, or approximately 46%.

We also hope to maintain RR expenditure shares for other Focus Areas at levels similar to their equivalent levels in the current plan, estimated at 21% for Basic Education, 12% for HIV/AIDS and 9% for Child Protection.

Other Resources are likely to increase for all Focus Areas, with significant growth expected for child survival, and for HIV/AIDS, thanks in part to a special five-year Global Campaign on Children and AIDS.

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Mr President, Distinguished Delegates,

As you heard this morning, our new Executive Director wants to make the pursuit of MDGs and collaboration with our sister UN agencies and other partners a centre-piece of UNICEF’s agenda.  The framing of UNICEF’s new business plan, at the very beginning of her mandate, gives us a golden opportunity to position UNICEF, once again, as the world’s premier agency for children.

Through this MTSP, we hope to position UNICEF to make a substantive contribution to children’s survival, protection and development through investments and interventions with a high probability of bringing “breakthrough” results for children from the poorest families.

In this, we strongly echo the call of the UN Secretary-General to pursue “Quick Wins” and lasting gains, in poverty reduction and fulfilment of children’s rights.

We aim to build on the proven strengths of our organization – while recognising the complementary strengths of many other partners working for children and the Millennium agenda - and the primacy of national leadership in all development efforts.

We want to thank Board members, observers, our sister UN agencies and NGO partners for giving us your valuable advice and inputs in drafting this business plan. We have benefited enormously from your guidance.

We apologize for the length of the document and the fact that we could not get it translated for the present meeting. I hope my summary today was helpful.

Your comments and advice at this Annual Session of the Executive Board will help the Secretariat in finalizing the document into a much shorter and crisper version, to be available in all UN languages, well in advance of our Second Regular Session in September.

Let me end by giving a word of thanks to our UNICEF staff – those here, and the many out in the field, who have worked so hard over the last few months to deliver this draft of the Plan to you.

We look forward very much to a lively discussion.

Thank you.

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