United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)

Performance evidence

Overview

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.

Performance rating summary

UNICEF organisational performance wheel — Organisational performance

Key findings

Its Strategic Plan enables UNICEF to implement its goals for children with a comprehensive results framework and integrated budget that involve every part of UNICEF.
Promoting gender equality as a cross-cutting priority enables the systematic implementation of global commitments.
The resource mobilisation strategy supports the achievement of the Strategic Plan, helping to maximise regular resources and leverage public and private sector resources.
Financial accountability practices in auditing, internal controls and anti-fraud ensure transparent and accountable systems.
Country programmes are aligned with national priorities, can flexibly respond to changing situations and deliver relevant results.
There is good engagement with UN partners through UNDS reform and global strategic partnerships aimed at accelerating progress towards achieving SDGs.
A results-based management system and results framework applies at global and country levels, supported by an independent evaluation function.
Output-level results are delivered in both development programmes and humanitarian action across the five goal areas.

The operating model and organisational structure are not purposefully aligned with the Strategic Plan and are being reviewed.
Resource alignment to strategic priorities is complicated by UNICEF’s reliance on inflexible additional funding (“other resources”).
UNICEF’s role in country strategies does not maximise the potential contributions from national capacities, including implementing partners, or the mobilisation of national resources.
Its partnership model focuses more on programme implementation, fundraising and advocacy than on developing catalytic partnerships that can achieve higher-level goals at scale.
The performance management system, including the results framework and evidence generation, is not fully geared towards helping country programmes to achieve UNICEF priorities.
Outcome-level results are off track and slowing UNICEF’s contributions to SDGs, despite strong outputlevel results.
Efficient delivery and sustainability of results fall short because UNICEF lacks the means to measure efficiency and insufficient national resources are invested after programmes are completed to make results sustainable.