MOPAN released its most recent assessment of UNICEF in 2020.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was created by the United Nations General Assembly in 1946. Its mission is to advocate for the protection of children’s rights, to help meet children’s basic needs and to expand opportunities for children to reach their full potential. Guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF strives to establish children’s rights as enduring ethical principles, set international standards of behaviour towards children and mobilise political will and material resources to deliver policies and services to children and their families.
In 2020, UNICEF’s mission on behalf of the world’s children faced significant external challenges: sustainable development gaps, persistent humanitarian crises and fragility, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and an environmental crisis and climate change. At the same time, it faced the internal challenges of translating programme results into more significant gains at the outcome level, working with increasingly high levels of earmarked funding and insufficient core resources, implementing new system-wide changes required by United Nations Development System (UNDS) reform, doing more to combat sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and sexual harassment (SH) and capitalising on opportunities associated with innovation, shared services and digitisation.
Since 2006, MOPAN has conducted four assessments of UNICEF’s organisational effectiveness. UNICEF has consistently received positive overall ratings according to the different MOPAN assessment methodologies. In 2016, UNICEF showed notable strengths in its organisational architecture, operating model, financial accountability and partnership approach. But it had room for improvement in cross-cutting areas, programmatic relevance, results focus, evidence use and its results achieved.
