Doing Better With Less: Unlocking Efficiency in the UN

A well-defined, fit-for-purpose organisational structure, aligned with strategic goals, is essential for the efficient allocation of financial and human resources, thereby reducing duplication and unnecessary costs. Streamlining structures helps to lower administrative burdens and foster accountability, creating leaner organisations that operate with greater efficiency.

An effective structure provides clarity on roles and responsibilities at every level, minimising confusion, avoiding duplication of effort and preventing wasteful use of resources. Clear reporting lines and well-designed delegation of authority help to prevent bottlenecks and accelerate decision-making.

Strong workforce planning is critical to ensure that an effective structure is supported by the right capacity. This is particularly important during periods of financial constraint, when rightsizing – and, where necessary, downsizing – is essential to navigate change. An efficient structure must also be flexible and adaptive, enabling quick adjustments when circumstances require.

Strategic human resource management ensures that recruitment, deployment and retention support the organisation’s ability to operate efficiently and maintain continuity. When managed effectively, human resources enable the organisation to work faster, achieve better results and do so at lower cost.

The following sub-sections are organised around these principles.

In recent years, many UN entities have undertaken structural reforms aimed at improving organisational effectiveness, strengthening alignment with strategic priorities, managing costs or reducing duplication. Most organisations framed their restructuring as part of broader efforts to align structures with newly formulated or updated strategic plans, ensuring they remained fit for purpose in a changing environment. Some reforms were explicitly linked to efficiency. The consolidation and relocation of back-office functions, discussed in previous sections, is one such example. Others combined efficiency objectives with wider organisational goals. For instance:

· WFP launched a three-phase restructuring to address inefficiencies, duplication and unclear roles across headquarters, regional bureaux, and country offices. This included streamlining headquarters departments, reducing the number of divisions by 26% and redefining the role of regional bureaux.

· The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) initiated a realignment to reduce staff numbers and rationalise headquarters functions in response to perceived overstaffing at the Secretariat, while decentralising functions to regional offices and strengthening integration with the Resident Coordinator system.

· The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Headquarters Optimisation Initiative sought to maximise both effectiveness and efficiency. It merged the Policy and Strategy Division with the Technical Division to form a Programme Division largely based in Nairobi and relocated the Evaluation Office to the same location. Expected benefits from the move included strengthened support to country and regional offices, enhanced knowledge sharing through closer geographical proximity and savings on staff-related costs, office rental and travel.

While it is too early to measure the efficiencies brought by these rationalisation initiatives, concerns have emerged regarding their implementation. While the restructuring at WFP was intended to reduce silos and enhance coherence, staff had expressed early concerns about limited consultation and the risk that budget cuts could weaken oversight and cross-cutting functions. Additional challenges include difficulties in scaling down operations and the absence of a systematic approach to exit strategies. In UNAIDS, the process was complicated by severe funding cuts affecting country envelopes and related HIV expertise. This rationalisation exercise generated considerable internal concerns regarding its implementation, the quality of communication and transparency in human resource management. For UNFPA, while the initiative has been broadly welcomed, concerns remained about the potential loss of talent, communication gaps with New York, possible business disruptions and diminished influence in UN intergovernmental processes.

UN entities have overall made strategic shifts to expand their footprint at country and regional levels, regardless of their mandate type or primary functions. Several agencies, such as UNDP, WFP, UNHCR and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), were already highly structurally decentralised, reflecting their strongly operational mandates. Others, including organisations with traditionally normative, technical support, or co-ordinating roles, have begun placing greater emphasis on regional and country-level structures. For example, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) has planned such a shift to better integrate its normative and operational mandates. The United Nations Programme for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) has also launched its Pivot to Countries and Regions, to be operationalised in 2025-26, with the aim of achieving impact at scale across its triple mandate by being closer to the regions and countries at the core of its work. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has progressively expanded its country and regional presence to strengthen partnerships, deliver projects at scale and accelerate implementation. Through its Transformation Agenda, WHO has sought to reinforce its country-level focus by redistributing human resources and introducing a new mobility policy. In FAO, structural decentralisation has been driven partly by strategic priorities, but also by the rapid growth in extrabudgetary funding, translating into an expanding portfolio of earmarked projects at the country level.

Several reforms remained unfinished at regional and country levels due to insufficient financial resources. While headquarters reforms have generally been completed successfully³⁴, reforms at the regional and country level have been slower. Key positions envisioned in the reform processes have remained vacant, and some functions are understaffed. This has been the case for FAO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), UN-Habitat, UN Women and WHO. A main issue hampering reform success has been the lack of sufficient funding to fully implement changes. Notably, many organisations did not have a dedicated budget for the reform process.

Decentralisation efforts have generated some efficiency gains when accompanied by genuine devolution of authority and adequate resourcing. Organisations such as IFAD, UNFPA, WFP, UNDP, UNICEF, UN-Habitat, IOM, WHO and UNHCR have seen increasing decision-making powers – such as budget decisions and resource reallocation – delegated to regional and country levels. Several of these organisations have reported related gains in both effectiveness and efficiency.³⁵ Effectiveness gains include delivering more context-appropriate results and strengthening engagement with partners. Efficiency gains have been observed in faster resource reallocation and an enhanced ability to respond rapidly to crises - for example, UNFPA during COVID-19 and WFP in emerging emergencies. Localised recruitment authority at UNHCR has also improved hiring speed and operational responsiveness. In contrast, in UN Women and UNRWA, decentralisation initiatives have been only partially implemented, with key functions such as recruitment approvals and major budget decisions remaining centralised. This has limited flexibility, slowed processes and reduced the intended benefits of decentralisation.

Successful decentralisation requires matching delegation of authority to country level with the administrative capacity required to exercise that authority. The experiences of UN-Habitat and FAO illustrate that delegating certain administrative functions to the country level can be premature when not supported by sufficient resources or capacity, leading to increased workloads and concerns over quality assurance. Getting the balance right requires sufficient time and resources. Organisations that move functions to the country level without sufficiently trained staff to exercise them risk merely moving bottlenecks from headquarters to the field, which could lead to concluding that reforms have been unsuccessful and recentralisation is required.

Unclear division of roles and responsibilities across different levels of the organisational structure persists in some organisations, creating inefficiencies. Several are hampered by fragmented or outdated accountability frameworks that have not kept pace with structural reforms.³⁶ For example, UNESCO lacks a defined accountability framework for its field network, leaving roles and responsibilities at regional and country levels unclear. Similarly, FAO’s accountability framework, last updated in 2020, does not reflect post-restructuring changes and fails to clearly define roles across its four organisational levels, contributing to operational gaps. Even where frameworks exist, inconsistent application and unclear role definitions lead to overlaps, reducing efficiency.³⁷ In UNHCR, for instance, overlapping roles across multi-country offices, country offices, regional bureaux and headquarters have created confusion with regard to oversight responsibilities. The 2024 evaluation of its decentralisation and regionalisation reform found that, despite intentions to strengthen oversight, the revised model introduced duplication, with regional bureaux prioritising technical support over their second-line oversight role.

Several organisations have taken steps to strengthen workforce planning, aiming at aligning staffing with functional needs and financial realities, and in some cases, undertaking rightsizing initiatives. UNHCR’s Workforce Planning Handbook (2023) operationalises the approach adopted in 2021, supported by human resource staffing indicators for monitoring. The introduction of Workday, a cloud-based human resource platform with workforce data and dashboards, has further enhanced strategic workforce planning and management. WFP has introduced a more strategic approach to workforce planning through its People Policy (2021) and Staffing Framework, which standardises human resource policies for assessing staffing needs and skill requirements. Supported by a service contract conversion exercise, this reduced the share of short-term staff from 61% in 2021 to 50% in 2022. Strategic workforce planning has been scaled up since 2018, with country and functional-level plans completed globally by early 2024, complemented by broader workforce transformation measures under the Critical Corporate Initiative “Investing in WFP People (2023-25)”. As part of its country-level transformation, WHO introduced the Core Predictable Country Presence (CPCP) initiative to ensure stable and reliable capacity in country offices. Core staff positions, support model and main delivery channels are tailored to each country office typology (A, B, C, D, E): policy support (A), targeted technical and strategic support (B), moderate technical support (C), full technical support with emergency response (D) and full support including field operations.³⁸ IFAD launched its Dynamic Workforce Planning process in 2021 to align staffing with operational needs and corporate priorities.³⁹ IOM has introduced Staff Downsizing Guidelines and, in 2021, launched the Human Resources Digital Handbook Portal to provide a centralised resource for human resource policies and processes.

However, workforce planning remained a major challenge for several organisations, driven not only by gaps in policies and guidelines but also by financial constraints. Some organisations lacked a formal human resource strategy or plan.⁴⁰ In more than one case, human resource functions lacked the capacity to support workforce planning or organisational transformation, as they were under-resourced due to austerity measures, notably at FAO, IOM and UN Women. Another factor undermining effective workforce planning was that staffing in UN entities had often grown through voluntary contributions, instead of being guided by strategic planning or long-term priorities⁴¹. Even when rightsizing efforts have been undertaken, these have not yet yielded the expected results, counterbalancing challenges.⁴²

High staff turnover is a major efficiency challenge, as many organisations continue to rely heavily on short-term contracts. High reliance on affiliated personnel was observed in six organisations.⁴³ Frequent staff turnover can lead to operational inefficiency and rising costs as it weakens institutional memory, increases training costs and disrupts operational continuity. The use of these contractual arrangements is both a result of short-term, project-based funding and of organisational staffing policies. UNFPA and UNRWA interestingly displayed different patterns. As of December 2022, 60.3% of UNFPA personnel were staff members.⁴⁴ UNRWA also stood out for its very low turnover, owing to its predominantly local workforce.