A COMMON VISION FOR UNCOMMON RESULTSAn overview of UN integration in Liberia

CONTENTS

Vision statement 1 Achieving a common strategy 2Achieving a common approach 6 Achieving common delivery 8Greater integration ahead 11Statement of commitment 14

Uniting our effortsVision statement

Never before has it mattered more to make a reality of the “united” in United Nations. As we commit to assisting governments throughout the world to help realize security and development, the entire United Nations family must come together more and more if it is to deliver on ever-growing aspirations in the ever tougher socio-economic climate.

We believe that our work in Liberia is doing just that. “At Work Together” means we strive to work as a united team at every level. Together we determine long-term strategy, knit the country team together with individual UN agencies, funds and programmes, the World Bank and the UN’s peacekeeping mission, UNMIL. We encourage staff to think beyond mandates and specific programmatic areas, supporting flexible and innovative working relationships across the UN family.

One of the reasons for integrating our efforts and expertise is to bring the best of the UN to bear on complex problems. Joint projects, joint campaigns, joint offices, joint analysis, joint policy planning and joint teams in the field all form part of our integrated approach. We want to maximize the individual and collective impact of the UN’s response. The UN has moved forward to rely on all of its assets as a whole – joining up the strengths and expertise of the mission, agencies, funds and programmes. This common vision is helping us move forward along a common path.

In the next pages, some of the specific achievements will be described, as well as how we are setting about our tasks together. In a structural sense, but also in terms of delivery, and achieving the ends that will improve lives of Liberians in the long term, our “do and learn” methods are working.

We are striving to integrate our efforts as we see this as the best way to support Liberia’s Government and people to reduce poverty and progress towards lasting prosperity.

At each stage, the level of our cooperation with Government and other partners reinforces the common capacity to address Liberia’s complex reality. Effective, integrated delivery depends on weaving a complex web of interventions – with actors binding together, united by an overall vision, to add strength to the whole effort. Post-conflict peacebuilding is undoubtedly a complicated undertaking, relying on harnessing different processes and building dialogue and a participatory approach to work. It involves recognizing and building on our individual and collective strengths and supporting each other to minimize our weak-nesses. The aim of these efforts is to assist Liberians, who now are witnessing the dividends of peace and the prospect of a more inclusive economy.

Much remains to be done. Liberia is still home to people emerging from 14 years of a devastating war, which ended in 2003. Health, unemployment and security are among people’s pressing concerns. Building roads, running vaccination campaigns and training new police officers are some of the ways the UN has helped the country take concrete steps to begin to heal itself.

We integrate not for the sake of integration, but for the strength of purpose, efficiencies and, most impor-tant, the results it can yield. We work together for the benefit of all Liberians.

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Aiming high

We want our contribution to help lead to the fastest transformation of lives in Liberia. The country is beginning to recover from 14 years of civil war that devastated lives, infrastructure and severely hampered hope. Given that difficult backdrop, the UN has made it a priority to find innovative ways to bring the UN Country Team (UNCT) – which consists of 16 specialized agencies, funds, programmes including the World Bank – together with UNMIL, the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Liberia, to support Government-led recovery in a precarious post-conflict environ-ment.

Everything is a priority, all at once – be it security, justice, education, food, prevention of sexual abuse, jobs, roads, sanitation, investment, even office furniture. With that in mind, we have set about making complex tasks as simple and clear-cut as possible.

Throughout, there have been tough decisions to take. We have all picked our way amid a series of potentially catastrophic risks that come with such post-conflict situations – securing stability in the immediacy of the aftermath of conflict, when there was little national capacity to deliver services for the people, for example. The peacekeeping operation was established at short notice in 2003, and had a lot to do. While the Mission has bene-fited from significant resources, many UN agencies have had to be creative with what they had, and it is against this background that our total contri-bution can be measured. We also keep the future at the front of our minds – at some point the well-equipped UNMIL peacekeeping mission will withdraw.

We have tried from the outset to plan our work together – among the UN family, among donors, NGOs and with the Government. Members of the UN family have executed as parts of an organic whole, drawing on knowledge, best practice, and comparative advantages of each other and external partners. This teamwork will be crucial to the country’s effort to secure long-standing achievements.

Harmonizing planning instruments

The most important aspect of this coordinated planning approach has been to coalesce around Government’s stated direction. Such high national ownership of plans and programmes to forward the country’s development and advance out of poverty meant that we have made it a priority to tailor our approach to support this.

Most recently, the Government has set out its plan to reduce poverty in its $1.61 billion 2008-2011 Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS), known as “Lift Liberia”, which was finalized in April 2008.

The entire UN in Liberia contributed to the PRS process under the leadership of the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General /Resident Coordinator (DSRSG/RC). The four pillars of the PRS provide a framework for Government to organize its response to pressing needs in the country, according to consolidating peace and security; revitalizing the economy; strengthening government and the rule of law; and rehabilitating infrastructure and delivering basic social services.

In coordinating our own response to support Government, we have developed a single frame-work for UN integrated planning in response to the clear national leadership given by the demo-cratically elected government. The 2008-2012 UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) establishes what the UN will do in Liberia, echoing each of the four pillars of the poverty reduction strategy. It adds a fifth tenet, to combat HIV/AIDS, due to the potential scale of the epidemic and the need to act before it takes hold. In support of national priorities, we have made the Govern-ment’s own framework, the PRS, the basis of our efforts. This has helped streamline and order our approach; for example, peacebuilding issues are threaded throughout the PRS and the UNDAF, rather than dealt with as an additional outcome under the UNDAF, as some countries have done.

While our own strategy is in line with the Govern-ment’s PRS, the UN’s joined-up policy advice and support during the preparation of the PRS also helped inform the Government’s own approach

ACHIEVING A COMMON STRATEGYPlanning together

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and priorities, and the UNDAF reflects our support for the implementation of the PRS. As such, the UNDAF remains a “living” document – one that must embrace flexible responses at every turn where possible.

In ensuring our own approach brings together the best of the UN family, and is as robust as possible, we have brought the UN peacekeeping mission into the preparation of the UNDAF, more usually an agency tool. This was important not only in estab-lishing a useful framework, but also in establishing a model for cooperation and integration within the entire UN family in Liberia.

Another part of the big picture is planning for the eventual withdrawal of UNMIL, to ensure that no glaring gaps will emerge. The UNMIL has consis-tently ensured that its mandate is interpreted in a way that includes UNCT activities.

Although it is unclear when or how quickly the peacekeeping operation will scale down, we can already plan for the long-term scaling up of UNCT. An integrated approach here will be critical to the future success of the UN in Liberia: as the peace-keeping mission assesses how best to withdraw, whenever that day comes, the input of the UNCT is also proving crucial to the planning and implementation of transition. The peacekeeping mission’s plan for Consolidation, Drawdown and Withdrawal (CDW), along with stage-by-stage benchmarks to establish the pace and timing of drawdown in concert, involves the UNCT. CDW

benchmarks have also been deliberately closely aligned to the Outcome Groups (OGs: see below) that monitor the implementation of the five outcomes of the UNDAF.

Monitoring

Setting out what we want to do in concert is not enough; we also want to make sure we achieve our goals, which means assessing how best to implement complex plans and regularly checking progress, recognizing where things are going less well, correcting and learning the lessons.

As we progress through UNMIL’s drawdown, a series of benchmarks will help us plan for the crucial CDW transition, enabling us to establish priorities and meet a series of goals. Including core and contextual benchmarks aims to give the Security Council a comprehensive assessment of progress in Liberia, and thus provides a key mech-anism to monitor progress.

In 2009 we introduced a UN Integrated Work Plan that sets out what we want to achieve each year in pursuit of the UNDAF, so that we can show the Government how we hope to realize the aims of the UNDAF’s five-year plan. The Integrated UN Work Plan is a matrix of UN agencies’ and sections’ planned activities, responsible parties, partners, timeframe and costs for the coming year. The UNDAF Outcomes and Outputs are used as the reference framework to enable monitoring of progress and analysis of the UN’s combined

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planned activities by each Outcome Group. The workplan will allow us to identify gaps, overlaps, key common priorities and possible areas for coop-eration at the beginning of the year.

Such planning instruments mean we are estab-lishing a common strategy to which we and the Government can hold ourselves to account. Both the UN and the Government will report against targets set in the UNDAF and the PRS in the same manner, so we can also all monitor progress together. By making sure our own system of moni-toring and evaluation heeds that of the Govern-ment, our annual UNDAF review assesses how far the UN family is reaching in its commitment to support Liberia’s new Poverty Reduction Strategy as well as the UNDAF itself. Not only does a single joint annual review meeting reduce transaction costs, it also reinforces a sense of teamwork and focus on results. It enables us to learn mutually reinforcing lessons together.

How we organize ourselves

Setting out and agreeing our priorities for both the long term and the step-by-step process of how to achieve them requires careful organization. As the circumstances and capabilities of Government have changed and developed, so we have evolved the way we organize ourselves.

During the emergency humanitarian phase, we relied on a series of clusters, which brought the UN family and other aid agencies together to concen-trate on key areas, such as water and sanitation; nutrition; health; food security; early recovery and protection. When the Government’s capacity to coordinate increased in 2007, the clusters were

folded into the Government-led coordination frame-work of the Liberia Recovery and Development Committee (LRDC). Now that the Government has its own structures to coordinate poverty alleviation, in particular with the new PRS, we work to support that instead.

For each of the four pillars of the PRS, the Govern-ment has established sector committees that hold regular meetings, for example to tackle health challenges. As the Government has acquired the capacity to step in and assert how best to coor-dinate nationally, we have moved away from the humanitarian cluster approach to support this structure.

Leadership too is crucial for ensuring we achieve results, through planning, implementing and moni-toring together. At the top, the Strategic Policy Group (SPG), established in 2007, is a high-level forum that brings together UNMIL Section Chiefs and Representatives of UN agencies in meetings held twice a month, and now oversees the imple-mentation of the UNDAF, chaired by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG).

UNDAF Outcome Groups (OGs) also enable us to promote progress towards achieving the aims of the UNDAF and enable us to provide coherent support to achieve the aims of the PRS, both of which are tightly linked. These OGs are organized for each of the five outcomes, topped by a convener from either a UN agency or an UNMIL section, with overall accountability to the Government of Liberia by the DSRSG/RC. One of the strengths of the integrated UN approach is that leadership of each OG can be provided from either the UNCT or UNMIL, whichever has the strength in a given area. Two groups are convened by UNMIL DSRSG (Rule of Law) and the Police Commissioner, and three by representatives from UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes, and each group presents its progress to the SPG every other month. These OGs also agree common work processes and work plans. This is particularly evident in Rule of Law sector. While UN Agencies have traditionally focused more on social services delivery, development and gover-nance, UNMIL offers leadership in Rule of Law. The UNDAF OG is an instrument for information-sharing and defining joint strategic direction, addressing challenges and gaps, and facilitating stronger UN Agency interventions and participation in security and Rule of Law-related activities.

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Each OG acts on behalf of the entire UN in Liberia for that single outcome, aiming to bring together joint UN advocacy, policy support and advice, technical leadership, expert UN opinion, and to maintain links to cross-cutting groups, to share information on exiting and pipeline programmes, relevant resource mobilization; and to create the possibility for joint outputs. We continue to make progress towards multi-purpose, strategic, func-tioning OGs.

Beyond that, four functional teams also look after technical issues, such as communications, monitoring and evaluation, common administra-tion services and programming. The UNCT and UNMIL, with its mix of resources and expertise, work together in these groups to provide better services and products than any single UN entity could do on its own. In addition, there is a series of thematic groups, ranged around cross-cutting issues such as gender and youth, which are significantly strengthened by the knowledge and capacity that UNMIL brings to what are tradition-ally UNCT forums. It is the diversity of the UN in Liberia, harnessed through clear leadership and accountability, which enables us to move beyond what we can deliver individually.

As we sought to take speedy action in the post-war environment, several ad hoc groups emerged, such as the anti-rape group. Today we are instead implementing through longer-term frameworks such as joint programmes that bring relevant parts of the UN together in line with one framework – such as that on Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV), with steering committees that take overall oversight for the entire programme. These are co-chaired by Government ministers and the DSRSG/RC. Together they can make decisions regarding assessing need, policy, budgets, work plans, monitoring and evaluation and how best to mobilize resources and work with partners. Each joint programme has a programme manager, to supervise staff and mete out responsibilities.

In all we have committed to six joint programmes. These are, in addition to the County Support Teams (CST) (see below): Food Security and Nutrition; Youth Employ-ment; SGBV; Gender Equality; and HIV/AIDS. All, with the exception of HIV and AIDS, have been signed with the Government and draw on national frameworks.

United Nations in Liberia Integrated Management and Coordination Structure

UN Country Team (UNCT)

Chair: DSRSG/RC/HC

Strategic Policy Group (SPG) Chair: SRSG

Security Management Team (SMT) Chair: SRSG

UN Mission in Liberia SRSG

DSRSG (RoL) DSRSG (R&G)

Inter-Agency Programming Team

(IAPT) Chair: UNICEF

Operations Management Team

(OMT) Chair: UNDP

UN Communications Group (UNCG) Chair:

UNMIL

M&E Group

Chair: UNDP

Gender Equality

Chair: UNIFEM, Co-chair: UNMIL OGA

Children & Youth

Chair: ILO Co-chair: UNICEF

Peacebuilding &

Conflict Sensitivity Chair: UNHCR

Food Security & Nutrition

Chair: FAO Co-chair: WFP

Environment & Climate

Change Chair: UNDP

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Prog

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UNDAF Outcome 1 Peace & Security

Chair: UNPOL

UNDAF Outcome 2 Economic Revitalization

Chair: UNDP

UNDAF Outcome 4 Infrastructure and

Social Services Chairs: UNICEF

UNDAF Outcome 3Governance and RoL, Chair: UNMIL DSRSG

Func

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al

UNDAF Outcome 5 HIV and AIDS Chair: WHO

Macro-economic

Taskforce Chair: WB

Inter-Agency Steering

Committee (IASC) Chair: HC

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Willing cooperation

Deciding to work together effectively requires willingness. In some cases simply ensuring people from different strands of the UN work together and get used to working together can bring dividends much later: the experience in Liberia shows that planning is important at early stages of integration. In preparing the UNDAF and CDW, for example, UN staff have become used to working together, with the same tools, to the same aims. That makes communicating plans and progress within the UN family much easier. It would have been easier still if integration had been foreseen at the time the peacekeeping mandate was being articulated.

We seek to eradicate needless, costly and inef-ficient duplication. By ensuring there is a joint UN presence not only conceptually but also on the ground, we can streamline our operations and budget and deliver more effectively, avoiding a doubled bureaucracy. Since the end of 2008, we have integrated the Office of the Resident Coor-dinator and the Office of the D/SRSG for Recovery and Governance – thus avoiding overlap of staff functions and ensuring better use of human resources and mutual support.

In the counties together

The County Support Teams (CST), of which there is one in each of the 15 counties, form a unique coordinating mechanism between the Mission and the Agency staff in support of local authorities and decentralization. Given that local authorities currently have limited capacity, the CST are a key support to Government and form part of the effort to restore national authority at the local level. The CST work through UNMIL Civil Affairs staff, with resources channeled through UNDP, monitoring and information offices supported by UNHCR and UNICEF – all managed by a joint steering committee co-chaired by the Minister of Internal Affairs and the DSRSG/RC.

The CST develop implementation capacity and local ownership of interventions, and form a key

way of working towards implementing the UNDAF and thus the PRS. Indeed, following 132 consulta-tions undertaken in all the country’s districts, the formulation of 15 County Development Agendas (CDAs) helped lead to and shape the PRS. Since the end of 2008, the responsibilities of the CST Facilitators have been strengthened as they have been combined with the new function as Head of Field Office in each county – this creates a streamlined reporting line at county level for both Mission and Agency staff. As UNMIL begins to draw down, these CSTs will form a crucial link in maintaining and sustaining the UN’s development presence, and, in time, will be able to broaden their focus to provide the kind of support that will be needed to match the process of decentraliza-tion to local authorities once those are formulated.

The nitty gritty

The most important element of our common approach is practical cooperation and imple-mentation, fostering greater administrative and logistical support integration and pooling resources and assets at all levels. So when it comes to working on the ground, especially in remote counties, we adapt our approach to be sure we can deliver. Whether it be car pooling or using the same health clinic facilities; ordering office statio-nery or sharing security guards in joint offices in the field; flying in the same planes or relying on the same bulk fuel, we are increasingly making strategic use of common services and integrating our structures on the ground to make the best possible use of the limited resources.

Our first joint premises outside Monrovia, the Joint UN Office in Voinjama, capital of the remote Lofa County in the north of the country, was opened in June 2008 and joins our functions in the most comprehensive way yet. It brings together seven UN agencies (FAO, UNDP, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNFPA, WFP, WHO) and UNMIL under one roof. Initially it enabled the first efficient use of scarce resources such as security guards, fuel stations, satellite internet communications and generators, and in the longer term it will enable an integrated approach to programming, work

ACHIEVING A COMMON APPROACHWanting to work together

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plans and staffing. It brings to bear the expertise and resources of the UN in remote areas, and the common premises provide a convenient mecha-nism to function as a united team, with a view to taking up a joint approach to programming and planning. It means staff leaders in the field constantly need to seek opportunities for further collaboration in planning and decision-making in Lofa. We also opened a second Joint UN Office, at Zwedru, Grand Gedeh County, in February 2009.

In each, the Head of Field Office promotes joint UN activities, coordinates these and meetings to follow up, keeps looking for linkages, and also takes the UNDAF, PRS and CDW into account with every plan.

Encouraging teamwork

In securing common approaches on the ground, leadership and approaches to human resources have a key role to play. We are therefore making a point of integration – we have held retreats, work-shops and discussions as to how best to elicit an integrated UN family. Strategies are all very well, but to avoid “document fatigue” and to ensure that commitment to the joint effort doesn’t wear thin and to ensure results, senior UN staff must show a personal interest in working together and consistently highlight the benefits of combining

expertise. Very simple ideas can pay large divi-dends: creating an environment in which it is more fun to work together will mean people are more likely to coordinate. It can be fruitful to make working together an end in itself – by including this in performance appraisals for example, which has been done for focal points on Sexual Exploi-tation and Abuse, it also boosts the chances for integration.

Staff should be encouraged to work together – ensuring the leadership’s personal interest alongside kudos for those who coordinate will thus be an integral part of the process and its success. This can also be achieved by a vibrant culture of communications; ensuring successful teamwork is communicated throughout the internal organization and beyond. Currently, the UN Communications Group (UNCG) has a joint work plan, producing a joint UN newsletter, radio programme, training for communications and programme officers, providing media outreach, and carrying out joint communications initiatives on special days such as the International Day of Peace, as well as a public website. We have much further to go in developing our communications, however, and we’re in the process of finalizing a Communication Strategy for the entire UN in Liberia as well as tools for internal communication with a view to engendering greater integration.

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Dividends of integration

The most crucial impact that we can hope to achieve is that we are succeeding in supporting significant improvements to lives. In many areas already, the UN has come together to do just that. Through some of the efforts at integration described, we believe we have reached much further and achieved much more than we could have done without it.

There are many examples, and we hope there will be many more. In our efforts to return Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to their homes, UNHCR, WFP, UNMIL and UNDP came together. Likewise, UNMIL, UNDP, UNICEF and others have come together for the reintegration of ex-combatants and children formerly associated with the fighting forces (CAFF).

Tens of thousands of children have been vacci-nated because the UN decided to bring all of its assets together –offering UN helicopters, UN health workers and UN expertise to support the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and the local County Health Teams in organizing, planning and

distributing supplies. Together this has helped ensure that Liberia is polio free (2008). So far 95% of children vaccinated against measles, and there have been no confirmed cases of measles in the past two years.

The Ministry of Public Works, together with UNDP and UNMIL, funded by the World Bank, have come together for short-term employment creation through labor-intensive road rehabilita-tion of primary and secondary roads. While UNMIL provided technical expertise and equipment, funding was channeled through UNDP. From 2006 to early 2009, more than 46,000 short-term jobs were created under this initiative, resulting in close to 1,500,000 million working days within a budget of more than US $6,000,000. Moreover, UNMIL and WFP have joined hands in implementing labour-intensive feeder road rehabilitation under the food-for-work programme, from which more than 10,000 community members have benefited. In developing and maintaining our dialogue with the Government, we have been able to focus on key things together, such as peacebuilding, conflict resolution, gender mainstreaming,youth empower-ment and child well-being.

ACHIEVING COMMON DELIVERYMaking it happen

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Another key example is the 15 CST, which enable meetings to take place in offices in far-off regions in a unified manner. Rather than assemble people beneath trees, the local authori-ties now have electricity, some equipped with solar power, vehicles and sufficient staff; they have County Develop-ment Agendas and are trained to lead team efforts in pursuit of these goals (see below for more details).

Joint programmesWorking through joint programmes forms a crucial part of the UN’s integrated approach. It means we can best utilize our own expertise and that of others, and together focus it on cross-cutting issues, bringing a joint approach to preparation, implementation and evaluation throughout. They might not necessarily deliver the quickest wins, but they create a means to divide the cake better and focus resources on priorities rather than donor preferences.

We have six joint UN programmes agreed in the UNDAF, and five have been finalized in coop-eration with the Government – County Support Teams, Sexual Gender-Based Violence, Youth Employment and Empowerment, Food Security and Nutrition, and Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. The UN comes together to consider joint needs-assessments, joint planning, coordinated implementation, joint monitoring and evaluation, collaborative decision-making, and streamlined dialogue with partners. It is through such joint programmes that we show integration really does improve delivery, not just talk.

Focus on Food Our $140 million Joint Food Security and Nutrition programme, 2008–2011, the first in the world that brings together the UN family and World Bank in support of both food security and nutrition, is a good example of a joint programme. It responds to the immediate needs of the global food crisis as well as the medium-term priorities in the PRS, and its joint approach recognizes that food concerns affect several aspects of the country – affecting not solely the health of the population, but also the economy as well as education concerns, making an integrated response the most sensible. The practical success of the project relies on joint analysis of data, which has helped us to develop the right interventions. Considerable joint analysis, including the Comprehensive Food Security and Nutrition Survey (CFSNS), undertaken by Government in partnership with FAO, UNDP, UNICEF, UNMIL, WFP and WHO in both rural and urban areas in 2006, and updated in 2008, provided the first information of its kind for years. This has helped sharpen the Programme, enabling more targeted support for food security and nutri-tion efforts.

Amid high levels of poverty, food insecurity and malnu-trition (44% of childhood deaths are attributable to malnutrition), the country imports 60% of its rice needs. Liberia risks losing $431 million to the economy by 2015 due to the impact of poor nutrition, and severe food insecurity during the 2008 food crisis saw food costs rise 22% in a year. Led by the Ministry of Agriculture, the joint programme brings together FAO, UNDP, UNICEF, WFP, WHO, UNIFEM, UNMIL and the World Bank, to ensure rice supply, increase food production and protect the vulnerable. Hot meals have been provided for 600,000 pre- and primary school children, and agriculture-related employment has been promoted for 40,000 women and youth. Working together has also enabled a streamlined fast funding mechanism administered by UNDP relying on a “pass-through mechanism” that unites various UN actors. This ensures donors deal solely with one agency, while still drawing on the expertise and delivery capacity of several, to secure resources at speed with little fuss. Through this mecha-nism, the Government of Denmark has offered $6.5m for 2009–2011 directly into the food and nutrition programme, for example.

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We believe that an integrated UN reinforces the quality of programmes, plays to expertise and improves both credibility and management of resources. In this way, looking for the overlap and making a virtue of it will strengthen the impact of projects and joint programmes.

Combined efforts will involve a joint approach to identifying target beneficiaries: in seeking to target women farmers as part of the Food Security and Nutrition joint programme, UNIFEM takes responsibility for trainings, FAO for tools, UNDP for building storage facilities, WFP for marketing trainings, and UNMIL has staff in the counties to help with monitoring. We also include communities in designing joint programmes to ensure local ownership, share information to raise awareness about joint programmes so others can feed into them, and ensure accountability through regular reporting and proper monitoring and evaluation schemes. Integrated approaches allow us to improve information-sharing, work to given advantages throughout the UN family operating in the country, monitor mechanisms jointly, hold regular meetings, link local initiatives into UN activities, and set operational norms for joint office and programme management (see Focus on Food box).

From campaigns to programmes

In the immediacy of the post-conflict situation, we often relied on time-bound campaigns to achieve delivery and cooperate on a large sale, as with vaccination campaigns. These are often largely dictated by timings and achieving as good a deployment of resources as possible, which make them relatively easy to work. While campaigns have well known limitations, they also provide an important boost to routine processes and, provided they are backed up by complementary information and services, can be highly effective.

The 2008 population census, led by the Govern-ment and supported jointly by UNFPA, UNMIL, UNDP, UNICEF and UNHCR, has proved a crucial planning tool that will provide all actors with key decision-making information.

In developing joint programmes, we have strived to integrate more robustly, through developing joint analysis to inform our approaches. Joint programmes are much more complicated to develop, and engage parts of the UN, Government and other donors in a different, more lasting and deeper way. Of necessity, they have taken longer to develop, and we believe they will deliver over the longer term too.

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Accounting for work

Liberia is in many ways already a model country on UN integration with joint programmes, joint offices, joint management and some joint work plans, but we want to do even better. We aim to hold ourselves to account, before the Govern-ment, before the people of Liberia, and before our own donors.

In holding retreats, and deliberately focusing on the value of integrating our efforts to the results we can help achieve on the ground, we have been grateful to learn from experts with experi-ence in other countries, as well as staff here who come across overlaps in their daily work, which show that efforts to integrate must never stop.

What next

As we prepare for the eventual withdrawal of the peacekeeping mission, we can take many

GREATER INTEGRATION AHEADKnitting together

practical steps to ensure that an integrated approach to planning, implementation and delivery ensures we minimize the danger of any gaps emerging. The pace will of course depend on developments on the ground, which only increases the need for close collaboration, as we monitor what stage we have reached and what to do next. Certainly, the post-mission envi-ronment will require us to change the way we deliver: no helicopters, limited logistical capacity, greater costs and fewer staff are among the chal-lenges we will face. A well-planned transition will thus be critical to lasting success, and will allow the UN family to support Liberia even after UNMIL has withdrawn. The SPG has decided to establish a mechanism, the Integrated Transition Design Team, to design elements of the transi-tion with the goal to ensure the UN’s continued impact during and after the UNMIL drawdown and beyond the end of the first PRS.

We can take some immediate practical steps, by

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looking at how to bring the UNCT and UNMIL further together. The UN Humanitarian Air Service, managed by WFP, already flies UN staff on mission to remote counties and neighboring countries at no cost, for example. UNMIL heli-copters fly UN agency staff across Liberia, as well as to Ghana and Sierra Leone. In the communi-cations realm we are also striving to share both internet and intranet networks. We will also strive for better information-sharing through our new Communications Strategy. In the counties, we must be creative about addressing challenges that are likely to remain for some time – how to reach hard-to-reach populations, unpredictable and insufficient funding with no common way of mobilizing resources, insufficient coordination among development partners, including ourselves, and encouragement to others to step in line with the Government’s four pillars of the PRS so we can all plan effective interventions and monitor their progress, too. To overcome fragmented financing, we must avoid parallel or isolated projects. Already the Government has estab-lished pooled funds for health and education, for example, and our joint programmes also rely on common funding channels.

In addition to our first two Joint UN Offices, we must also understand that if our field structures are to work and to respond effectively to local challenges, we must trust our local staff leaders take decisions, to give them the authority to plan projects and make them a reality. As we support the Government’s decentralization policy, we must make efforts to deepen our own.

At the strategic level, we must establish who is responsible for what – whether it be partners, timing, costs or plans – and ensure we account for ourselves, identifying gaps, overlap and key common priorities and possible areas for cooperation. Donor coordination remains an area ripe for improvement. We want to agree frameworks for accountability and performance reviews for staff where greater teamwork will be beneficial: for county staff reporting to the Head of Field Office, staff in joint programmes reporting to the manager, or active participation in the gender theme group, for example.

Sometimes this will require a significant change in behavior and attitude among our staff, and our strong leadership and commitment to joint efforts will help make this a reality. Boosting our internal communications efforts will help as well.

In 2009, we hope to increase coordination to mainstream cross-cutting issues such as gender equality, human rights and conflict sensitivity. We will also give stronger emphasis to empowering staff throughout the organizations, so that those who are closest to a particular challenge have the necessary flexibility and motivation to work together and find efficient and creative solu-tions. It might be easy to find good leaders who decide good things, but we must ensure that we take our staff with us on this journey – regular meetings with access to leaders, alongside well-developed internal communication will help make the difference.

We must also strive for higher levels of trust among agencies and sections so that division of labor truly can work, and communicate the importance of integration as part of this effort. We also need to see how to make both UNMIL and the UNCT work further, so that we share the best of what we have to offer, whether it be transport and administration support, sharing services such as communication and information technology, or putting our analytical expertise and brain power to work together.

One journey

We want to take the whole of the UN family and our Government and development partners with us on this journey as we streamline our bureau-cracy and improve our delivery through an integrated approach. Clear expectations, regular monitoring, as well as consistent action, are crucial. From the outset we have taken a practical approach to sharing the best we have to offer, for example by establishing joint Government, UN and donor committees to support Government leadership during the transition from emergency coordination characterised by aid coordina-tion and humanitarian clusters, to recovery and development. Today’s integrated planning means everyone can look ahead in the same direction, plan together and, most important, deliver for the benefit of the Liberian people.

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STATEMENT OF COMMITMENTBeyond UNMIL and the UNCT: The United Nations Integrated Team in Liberia

One of the gratifying aspects of developing our integrated approach to working and deliv-ering together is that we are increasingly asked how we do it. We like that question, because it makes us think more not only about what we are already doing, but also how to improve our integrated approach to achieving and maintaining security and development in Liberia.

We have learned that nothing can be achieved without Liberian ownership. Not only does that mean listening to the Government and aligning our own framework to that of the Government’s at the center, but it also means encouraging debate and input from local communities in regular consultation. This is why we have made it a priority to base ourselves throughout the country, but while streamlining our systems. Part of it is about peeling back bureaucracy – ensuring there are fewer parallel systems, and that organizations work in synch for the same aims. We are committed to improving that process: looking for the overlap, elim-inating duplication, integrating our systems whether it be sharing the internet or planning a project. We want to be proud of good practice that embraces the innovative and the creative, mainstreaming cross-cutting issues and developing policy and operational partnerships.

Being “at work together” cannot be a title alone – it must be embraced by the hearts and minds of all our staff and embedded in the very fabric of every decision and step we take.

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Text: Katrina MansonPhotographs and design: Christopher HerwigPhoto page 10: UNFPAMonrovia, March 2009©United Nations in Liberia

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