The United Nations Development Programme

"This was a book written about UNDP, an organisation which, when I was its head, was 40-something years old, and he wrote about its history from the beginning. I encouraged him to write it because I felt it was an extraordinarily important but unknown development agency. Yes, and it is a significant organisation in its own right, now with an annual budget of over five billion dollars and offices in more than 160 countries. They are very much the core of the UN in terms of development. It was considered a friend to developing countries whereas the World Bank was viewed as much more a donor-driven organisation. It gave me a chance to apply my thinking about democracy and development through the extremely sympathetic vehicle of this organisation because developing country leaders listen to it. And this book is a history of how UNDP had always tried to find a more subtle, gentle, pro-developing-country view of development versus the more Western institutions like the World Bank. There is. It is partly a backlash that periodically comes at time of economic hardship at home. Suddenly the grumbles of an anti-development assistance community gets a lot more resonance when public spending is under general pressure and cuts. Nevertheless, developing countries should have much more control in their own decision-making about how resources are used. And the idea they should set their own development priorities has always been the UNDP way. Yes, and there is a second advantage to UNDP when we talk about countries like the two you have just mentioned, in that it is much more able to get on the ground and work directly with them and provide the capacity they lack to implement decisions when, like these two, they have weak institutional capacity in the government."