16th Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers of the ... - Development

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16th Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers of the United Nations System and Host Country Agencies
U. Contribution of UNDP on the Global Review of Stipends,
presented by Ms. Lulu Del Rosario, UN Conditions of
Service Section
212. The representative of the UNDP Headquarters could not attend the meeting due to
other commitments but authorized the UN Conditions of Service Section to make
the presentation on behalf of UNDP. Ms. Lulu Del Rosario took the floor to present
UNDP’s contribution on the Global Review of Stipends. The current business process
was that in partnership with UNDP country offices, UNDP Headquarters initiated the
global review. The country offices submitted their data to the UN Secretariat for analysis.
Data was then sent to UNDESA which published and maintained monthly rates for the
UN wide implementation. Challenges of the current process were that UNDP Headquarter
resources to initiate the review were very limited. UNDP country offices made
very limited direct use of the fellowships programme. No staff at the country office level
was dedicated to administer and coordinate stipend-related initiatives. UNDP, with its
streamlining capacity in manpower and budget, was focused on building capacity, advocacy
and other larger scale practical development initiatives. UNDP was the sole UN
agency at the country level tasked to conduct reviews. Its resources were allocated based
on either results or cost-recovery services. Therefore, UNDP proposed three measures:
Firstly, cost-sharing amongst other agencies on stipend-related initiatives should be considered.
Secondly, stipends could be linked to the DSA. And thirdly, the UN agency with
the most fellows could preside over the coordination and collection of data.
213. The adequacy of stipend rates is a sensitive issue which affects directly the well-being of
the fellows. In general the cost of living in each country goes up. But there are countries,
as pointed out by the Conditions of Service Section, which warranted a decrease.
Therefore, the review did not mean that stipend would only increase. In reality, stipend
rates could not reflect the level of economic development of a given country at every
stage. As a matter of policy, stipend rates should be reviewed globally every three years.
However, due to many factors, they had not been reviewed for many years. There was,
thus, a backlog which had to be reviewed as soon as possible. WHO reinforced the
point that in some important countries stipend rates were still very low whereas in
some others they did not exist at all. Furthermore, they had found out that in certain
countries there had been a considerable difference between travel rate and resident rate.
For these reasons, WHO welcomed the suggestion to review the stipend rates based on
a percentage of the DSA.
214. DESA clarified that by cost sharing UNDP meant that it was no longer prepared to do
the surveys free of charge and suggested that all agencies shared the fee that UNDP would
charge for future reviews. As for the different rates of short-term fellowships addressed
by WHO, DESA advised to prorate the daily stipend starting from the monthly rate as
published on the DESA website. DSA was to be given to study tour participants whereas
stipend had to be applied to fellows. It was, therefore, a question of clearly differentiating
between study tour participants who participated in short-term programmes and fellows