The United Nations Secretariat as international development actor

In recent years, not least due to the reforms of the UN Secretary General António Guterres, the role of the United Nations Secretariat as a coordinator and actor in international development cooperation has grown in importance. Wasim Mir (Senior Fellow, UN Foundation) and Sebastian Borchmeyer (Senior Program Officer, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung New York) examined in the research report Reevaluating the United Nations Secretariat's Contribution to Economic Development to what extent the United Nations Regular Budget should count as Official Development Aid (ODA) as defined by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). For the UN Secretariat, the coefficient determining the ODA eligible share of an organization’s budget has been 18% since 2013 – this is considerably lower than the coefficient of other international (development) organizations. This underestimation of the UN Secretariat's ODA Coefficient no longer does justice to its role in implementing 2030 Agenda and a reassessment is therefore necessary.