United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

Performance evidence

Overview

The 2024 MOPAN assessment of UNFPA highlights strong progress since the previous one, emphasizing key achievements and opportunities.

UNFPA’s mission is to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fulfilled, including in humanitarian settings. To achieve this, the Strategic Plan 2022-25 focuses on three transformative results (3TRs): ending preventable maternal deaths, addressing unmet needs for family planning, and eliminating gender-based violence (GBV) and harmful practices such as child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM), with a commitment to prioritising populations left behind.

Despite a challenging operating context, UNFPA has successfully delivered the outputs of its strategic plan, even if achieving the 3TRs and the related SDGs by 2030 will still require a significant effort, as the slowing progress on the 3TRs shows.

As UNFPA embarks on the development of its next strategic plan, it now has an opportunity to revisit its strategic priorities and transformative goals and consider strengthening its work on population change. It could also better capture cross-cutting priorities and rebalance funding priorities. UNFPA can show significant efforts and successes in generating funding for its work and in moving from funding towards funding and financing. Diversifying funding will have to remain a priority in the current financial environment.

UNFPA has successfully transformed itself into a development-humanitarian organisation, aligning its operating model with its strategic vision. To serve its partners better, UNFPA has delegated greater authority to regions and country offices and is relocating some of its functions. It has launched a new risk policy and established more robust, independent oversight functions to strengthen accountability, transparency and responsible decision-making, including at country-level.

The assessment sees further scope for improving UNFPA’s operational excellence by linking up its humanitarian and long-term work more coherently, making the impact of its work more sustainable, delivering even faster, and rolling out its new risk management policy in all countries consistently.

Performance rating summary

UNFPA organisational performance wheel 2025 — Organisational performance

Key findings

UNFPA’s Strategic Plan 2022-25 and long-term vision are strongly aligned with the SDGs through the transformative results.
Building on the successes of previous reforms, UNFPA continues to be a fundamental pillar of the ongoing repositioning of the UN development system.
UNFPA has further solidified its presence within the international humanitarian sphere in SRHR and GBV.
The organisation demonstrates strong accountability in its uptake of lessons learned and of recommendations from evaluations.
UNFPA has issued its first Enterprise Risk Management Policy and invested significantly in independent oversight functions.
UNFPA’s decentralised structure fosters agility and effective partnerships, as exemplified by its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reaffirming UNFPA’s core mandate in population and development would require a strong focus at the strategic and intervention levels.
While maintaining a focus on the transformative results, sharpening UNFPA’s scope would be necessary to encompass other SRHR issues within the framework of universal health coverage.
Strengthening the humanitarian-development-peace nexus and reflecting it better in UNFPA’s programme design process.
It is currently a challenge to establish clear standards and procedures for AAP that involves these populations in decisions directly impacting their lives.
Building on the new strategy for financing the ICPD Agenda, actively pursuing strategies to increase new funding from governments in the form of domestic resources and leverage additional development financing resources would be necessary.