Energy procurement. Across its portfolio, UNDP is a significant purchaser of equipment for renewable energy production, efficiency measures and logistical operations. UNDP has demonstrated its ability to leverage its purchasing power in the health sector and other fields. Under its energy portfolio, however, the organization does not leverage this purchasing power to encourage cost-efficiencies or to promote private sector engagement in developing countries. Its Green Solutions team in Copenhagen is seen as a model of excellence for its seven-step approach to procuring solar equipment; however, this initiative is also dependent on grant funding and therefore not applied widely enough. The opportunities from UNDP procurement are recognized by internal and external staff but are not taken up in the new Sustainable Energy Hub model or the African Mini-Grids programme. A more systematic approach specifically on “green” procurement has not yet been considered.
BOX 6. Emerging initiatives for common intervention approaches in UNDP The DREI toolkit (See chapter 4.6) is the oldest approach reviewed and the closest example of an initiative that could be built into a model that supports more country offices in providing consistent support to Governments. As described above, it requires more conceptual work for the post-analysis phase, but this could form the vision through which UNDP articulates how it will target components of the enabling environment and build a sequence of activities and projects that are staggered over a 10-year period. The new GEF-funded African Mini-Grids Programme provides a regional umbrella structure to support 18 countries that are implementing national projects to increase energy access. The programme intends to provide dedicated knowledge-sharing and support anchored in activities of the umbrella programme to facilitate exchange. Internal stakeholders still see a risk that the individual projects will be developed, implemented and approved one by one. The project document and interviews suggest that the programme currently has limited flexibility for resource fungibility between countries, which may limit the ability to support projects that require longer implementation time. Finally, the concept of the Sustainable Energy Hub attempts to provide thematic coherence and competence through a global structure. The hub team will be located regionally and is intended to cover different competencies with respect to financing energy investments. This is expected to leverage more funding for downstream implementation and thus has a higher probability of reaching the ambitious quantitative targets. As downstream financing is not necessarily seen by the country offices as their comparative strength, the support should be tailored to and expand existing capacity. Although these initiatives offer new macro-level capacities for UNDP, few of these approaches are suited to ensuring continuous energy operations on the country office level. The examples of success in the UNDP portfolio suggest that this continuity to government energy planning can be provided only by experienced country office staff.
Chapter 4. FINDINGS
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