Last month the Associated Press (AP) reported that four African countries - Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, and Zambia - had misused grants from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a revelation that was first made public by none other than the Global Fund itself. The Fund’s inspector-general conducted audits and investigations in 33 of the 145 countries that receive grants from this financing facility.

The investigations concluded that millions of dollars worth of drugs for malaria sent to Africa have been stolen and resold on commercial markets and that recipient organisations in some countries routinely forge documents to siphon money off the Fund.

These revelations of fraud and corruption are having an unintended effect: several governments and watchdog organisations are now urging for more rigorous investigations on corruption within the United Nations, which is apparently not as transparent as the Global Fund in making its findings on corruption public.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) is responsible for managing about ten per cent of the Fund’s grants, but access to internal UNDP audit reports on how the money is spent is virtually impossible. UNDP says that the organisation’s policy bars it from sharing internal audit reports with the Global Fund - a bizarre type of reasoning, considering that the latter provides the funds to UNDP and has a vested interest in knowing how they are used.

(Interestingly, the Global Fund was created in response to cumbersome UN bureaucracy and opaqueness, so its use of UNDP to manage the grants was probably not a good idea. However, people who understand how the Global Fund operates say that while the Fund is more transparent than the UN, the grant application and implementation processes are extremely complicated and impact countries’ ability to secure funds and use them effectively.)

Nonetheless, results of Global Fund investigations are publicly available on the organisation’s website and the Fund is obliged to take disciplinary action against countries implicated, unlike the UN, which tends to engage in cover-ups and face-saving propaganda for fear of losing donor funding.

Robert Appleton, the Global Fund’s investigations director, understands this very well. In 2009, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon disbanded the UN’s highly efficient investigative unit, the Procurement Task Force, then headed by Appleton. Since then, the number of fraud and corruption cases investigated by the UN have dropped dramatically.

The problem is made worse by lack of enforcement of whistleblower protection. A recent AP report reveals that the acting chief of the division that investigates wrongdoing at the UN is currently under investigation himself for allegedly retaliating against two whistleblowers.

In the recently-published anthology ‘Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits’, Isisaeli Kazado notes that fear of retaliation discourages many potential UN whistleblowers from speaking up, even though a whistleblower protection policy has been in place since 2005. She claims that ‘whistleblowing…is neither encouraged nor tolerated’ and that ‘the culture of conformity, silence and fear’ is so pervasive that ‘as soon as you are seen blowing the whistle, your own colleagues won’t even sit next to you in the cafeteria’.

Questions are also being raised about whether the UN is really the best organisation to tackle health issues in the world’s poorest countries.

Research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shows that some UN health programmes are ineffective, and quite often harmful, to the health of beneficiaries.

A study found that a $27 million Unicef programme to save children in West Africa failed, as the children who were not included in the programme actually had a better chance of survival than those who were.

All these revelations have made at least one group happy: Republicans in the US Congress, who have always viewed the UN with suspicion and hate the fact that a quarter of its operational budget comes from the United States.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee has introduced a Bill to slash US funding to the UN and to get the body to institute a rapid schedule of reforms.

Unfortunately, this knee-jerk reaction may lead to even more, not less, secrecy and opaqueness within the UN’s various programmes and agencies.

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* Correction: This article was updated on 23 February 2011. Previously it stated: 'The UN Development Programme (UNDP) is responsible for managing more than half of the Fund’s grants, but access to internal UNDP audit reports on how the money is spent is virtually impossible.' UNDP only manages about 10 per cent of the Global Fund; this correction was made in a subsequent AP story that the author did not read.

* This article was first published in the Daily Nation. Rasna Warah's 'Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits: An Anthology' (ISBN: 9781434386038) is published by AuthorHouse. Rasna Warah can be contacted at [email protected].
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.