$5.7 Billion UN Anti-Poverty Agency's Actions Do Little to Reduce Poverty

$5.7 Billion UN Anti-Poverty Agency's Actions Do Little to Reduce Poverty

Although the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) ostensibly exists to reduce poverty around the world, a recent UNDP internal document reveals that the agency has “only remote connections with poverty.”

Moreover, the document says that even where the agency does act to reduce poverty, the actions are frequently “disconnected” from any kind of overarching plan.

Because of this, even when UNDP projects were done with the right kind of planning in mind, assessments of whether the projects actually reduced poverty were “often unclear.”

UNDP spent $8.5 billion on poverty reduction between the years 2004 and 2011, yet the agency readily admits it’s difficult to “demonstrate” any “significant change in the lives of the people it [tried] to help.”

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