University of INTOSAI

Mr. Joseph D’Cruz

Senior Adviser, Strategy and Planning, United Nations Development

Programme (UNDP)

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening all our colleagues around the world! It is a
pleasure to be here and an honor to be able to share with you some of the lessons and
experience that we in the UNDP have encountered this past year in dealing with COVID
pandemic.

I’d like to do three things today: to describe a little bit our own experience of how we
navigated the COVID pandemic; to talk briefly about some of the work we’ve done to support
governments in our program countries to also sustain the operations while the pandemic
occurred; and then start sharing the initial lessons and implications that we have seen from
this experience which we hope will be useful for you.

So first of all, the way of introduction, the UNDP is the United Nations systems development
agency, and we work on the ground in around 170 countries and territories to support people
in achieving the 2030 Agenda. We work on providing technical and policy advice to
government capacity building. We also work on a range of programs and services on the
ground around poverty inclusion and governance climate change, etc. So we have a very
broad footprint of operations in some of the most remote parts of the world.

13th of March 2020 the Secretary General announced that the United Nations system was
shifting to virtual work as a result of the pandemic and within UNDP over that weekend we
instructed all our offices around the world to initiate the contingency plans we had in place to
shift to remote working. Within six days we had transitioned all our operations around the
world onto virtual platforms, and we are able to continue providing the civil services support
that we provide to governments in pretty much a seamless way.

We did encounter some challenges. We work in some of the most remote places in the
world. And while our own internal systems and structures functioned well, and our
collaborations with governments and other partners in most cases functioned well, the most
critical part of what we do in many cases is the final human interface with the beneficiaries’
work, whether these are poor farming communities whom we provide support, whether these
are programs that we support in government that work with providing civil services to people
in cities. And that final step interface at what we talk about as leaving the one behind the last
mile, that is a critical point I’d like to come back to later.
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But overall I would say we were able to transition quite effectively and seamlessly. Almost
immediately thereafter we realized that many of our partners and governments did not have
at that point the capacity to make a similar transition. So working with some of our
technology partners we quickly extended our infrastructure as an interim measure to support
the functioning of governments in many countries. We provided telecommunications and
Internet infrastructure for prime ministers’ offices and cabinets in some countries. We used
our own online platforms, Zoom, MS Teams, our financial transaction platforms to allow
many of our program country governments to continue operating while they themselves built
the kind of capacities that are needed. So we ended up in some points supporting everything
from the functioning of capital offices through to the functioning of judicial systems so that
courts can continue to function and so that prisoners were able to get hearings on time. And
as we moved into the course of the year we also worked with governments to help them build
the capacities they need to continue. So they were able to move off our platforms to their
own.

Now let me talk a little bit about some lessons and implications from this because I think this
is for us the most important part.

Firstly, and in this I’d like to echo what Mr. Chubais you were saying in your remarks, we
recognize that in the years to come all our operations, all the functioning of our global society
are going to be subjected to shocks and crisis of their source. And the key point that we have
learned is not that we need to be able to predict what form those shocks and crisis might
take but that we need to build the capacities and the resilience to be able to respond to
shocks and crisis no matter in what form. For us this is an important lesson.

Right now in the world there is a tremendous focus on building capacities to respond to
future pandemics, and this is important. But the next shock that hits our global system might
be something other than a pandemic. It could be a natural disaster, it could be a social
upheaval, it could be something that we cannot anticipate right now. So as we think about
building our capacities to respond, we ask ourselves how can we build capacities to respond
wherever that shock comes from. And in our own systems of course we are learning a
number of lessons of this.

Firstly, our ability to respond to this crisis when it happened was based on having a
foundational set of capacities available when we needed it. So we had the technology
platforms, we had the ability to shift even a lot of our existing manual processes (banking
systems, document signing) onto the electronic equivalents, when we needed to do so. And
when the crisis happened we realized that in many cases the pace at which we had moved
to using these more modern systems was actually slowed or constrained more by our
internal culture and our reluctance to change rather by the lack of these solutions. So to give
you one example, we have in many places still continue to sign and authorize documents
manually on paper for many years even though we had the technical capacity to do it
electronically.

When the crisis happened, and we had no other choice, the entire organization moved to
using electronic systems overnight. So as we think about resilience to shocks and crisis, we
also recognize that very often the constraints that limit us on a day-to-day basis are not in the

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technology or in the availability of solutions but in the culture and the risk aversion of our own
internal systems. This is something that we have learned.

Secondly, our ability to respond has been built on creating the systems and running
exercises that anticipate what might happen. We have in all our offices around the world
business continuity plans that we design and test out to anticipate what might happen, for
instance in a situation where we are unable to access our offices. So we’ve trained our staff
in many offices on how to operate from home remotely, and we’ve ensured that all our
processes work in the event we were not able to access our office because of a pandemic, or
a war, or an insurrection, or a flood or something else. So when we were forced to make this
transition, our teams already had a familiarity with the steps that we needed. Many
governments do this as well, and we strongly encourage this is something that we should
invest more in the years to come.

Thirdly, when the crisis happened it affected every country, every community simultaneously.
And we found in many cases that the solutions we were coming up with to respond both for
ourselves and to support our partners in government were being needed very rapidly in
different places around the world.

One thing we’ve worked on a lot over the last couple of years is to build the structures and
the cultural identity of UNDP to function as a global network. We’ve encouraged our staff to
build the ability to connect horizontally amongst our offices and to very rapidly share
knowledge and experience solutions. And when the crisis hit we saw this work in reality in
many contexts.

So, as I mentioned just now, we have a number of countries in which we were working with
the judicial system to transition court systems online. Our team in Bangladesh was doing
this, our team in Uganda was doing this and elsewhere. And what we found was because our
teams communicated rapidly they were sharing both the solutions but also the issues and
risks to watch out for amongst themselves which improved our performance and our capacity
dramatically. The ability to have a global network that shares knowledge solutions,
intelligence, experience rapidly in a horizontal fashion was one of the biggest assets that we
provide as UNDP. It also allows us to see new problems emerging very rapidly and to build
solutions faster than we could have.

One thing was unexpected for us was in the early days of the pandemic many of our
government counterparts saying to us that one of their biggest challenges was dealing with
misinformation, with rumors and false stories going around about the origins of the
pandemic, about solutions, etc. And because this was coming up in many parts of the world
simultaneously, we built a team that worked with top global experts to develop solutions. We
partnered with the government of Sweden on this, we partnered with universities on health
science. So we built a core solution that is being applied in over 20 countries simultaneously,
because our global network allowed us to see this problem emerge in many different places
at the same time. And more and more in the future we see this as being one of the top
values of an organization like UNDP to set foot on the ground more quickly because we are
present in many places simultaneously and to work with partner organizations to build these
kinds of solutions.

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Last but not least though I come back to what we still see as being one of our biggest
challenges and this is what I refer to just now as the last mile challenge. In order to be
effective, and we believe this is true of any government system, we need to focus
tremendous attention on the edge of our system, on the people and the systems that do not
have access to the knowledge or the resources or capacities to be able to respond to this
crisis in the way we do.

So to give two examples, in many parts of the world we work with our government
counterparts to provide cash assistance to poor people whether this is in response to shocks
and crisis, whether this is as part of social service provision. And in many parts of the world
that cash transfers to beneficiaries. This still has to be done in a manual way. Teams going
out into slum areas or into rural villages to manually hand over money, and that, of course,
was one of the biggest things that we struggled with in the transition to the pandemic. We
had to build very rapidly cheap but verifiable and usable digital solutions that could be used
in remote areas by people who had very limited access to the Internet.
At the same time, in the monitoring of our work we face constrains in how we were able to
access many of the remote communities we worked with. So in many cases we had to
quickly build partnerships with local counterparts to undertake monitoring on our behalf and
to build the systems by which we could validate and verify the trustworthiness of the
information they provided. I believe this is also a challenge that many SAIs would face as you
move into doing auditing in these kinds of constrained crisis situations.

Having said that, one of the positives for us in all of this, whether it is in terms of the digital
capacities for payments that we built or whether it is in the terms of the work we did with the
government systems to transition into the pandemic was that we found that because UNDP
is a long-standing and trusted partner on the ground governments were actually very
comfortable in trusting their operations to our systems. In many countries we even had
situations where cabinet officers and government ministries quickly adopted UNDP’s own
platforms to operate where they needed to because they knew us well enough, they trusted
our transparency, our competence, our legitimacy in country, that they were confident that
this was a solution that would meet their own requirements for trust and verification. We are
continuing to invest in transparency and credibility of our systems so that they can form
emergency response capacities for our government counterparts whenever they need to use
those.

Colleagues, these are some of the lessons, insights and implications that we are seeing from
the COVID pandemic. We are still studying very intensively our experience over the past
year. We expect of course that we’ll be learning many more lessons in the months and years
to come as we look back over this experience.

It’s been a pleasure to share experience with you and I look forward to engaging with all of
you in terms of your own experiences as well.