Washington, DC – 23 October 2023 – Development is about the future, and advancing it requires an agile, flexible and strong operational platform, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Assistant Administrator Angelique Crumbly told a gathering in Washington, DC, to mark United Nations Day, the anniversary of the United Nations’ founding in 1945.
Crumbly, who leads UNDP’s management services bureau, detailed the significant work beyond that done by frontline staff who engage with the people its operations serve in more than 170 countries.
From financing to forecasting to ensuring necessary safeguards are in place, development professionals across many disciplines are “the enablers that help UNDP and its partners achieve the development results you can see and measure,” she said.
The event was held at the United Nations Foundation on 17 October and moderated by the Director of the United Nations Information Center in Washington, DC (UNIC Washington), Stefania Piffanelli.
“An army marches on its stomach,” Napoleon Bonaparte said two centuries ago to illustrate how logistical operations leverage military might.
Likewise, winning battles against poverty, entrenched inequality and other barriers to sustainable growth, requires deploying more than the familiar “weapons” of humanitarian and other assistance.
To achieve results that boost a community’s progress toward development also means “we need to mobilize the community to engage and better our world,” Crumbly said, adopting some of the tenets of the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area (UNA-NCA), which hosted the event.
The crisis of the FSO Safer, a tanker abandoned off the coast of Yemen in 2015, which experts feared would break apart, spilling a million barrels of oil into the Red Sea, powerfully illustrates a recent challenge development professionals faced. UNDP worked alongside others to secure a vessel to which the FSO Safer’s contents could be transferred, Crumbly said.
The salvage operation was urgent: waiting too long risked a spill of four times more oil than the notorious Exxon Valdez discharged into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. That environmental catastrophe would have devastated the Red Sea, ruining fish stocks for 25 years and upending the livelihoods of 1.7 million people, experts warned.
If that happened, clean-up costs would have topped $20 billion. Preventing the spill required an investment of $80 million, but nations pledged just half that. The United Nations launched a crowdfunding campaign and by September 2022 had enough funds to begin the operation’s tricky first phase.
Fighting in Yemen, restrictions on any UN operations, and a host of other challenges meant navigating complex legal, financial and political realities, Crumbly said. UNDP’s team, working alongside others, delivered.
Other work is less dramatic but yields profound progress in three core areas: democratic governance and peacebuilding; climate and disaster resilience; and sustainable development. In the past year that has translated into registering 27 million new voters – just over half of them women; leveraging $224 million in investments to support environmentally-sustainable recovery; securing clean, affordable and sustainable energy for 4.6 million people; and undertaking other crucial initiatives.
“A strong operational platform means that you can make good use of resources, because you have the necessary financing and forecasting tools, as well as controls, in place,” Crumbly said. “It means that you are able to make informed decisions because you have accurate and readily available data. Finally, it also means that you can recruit the right people and experts.”
Crumbly draws on her experience at the United States’ premier development organization, the US Agency for International Development, where she spent most of her career. “It is by working together that we will be able to identify new ideas and continue to reshape how our organization responds to the challenges our world now faces,” she said.
