2.3 Partnerships and strategic positioning Finding 12. Partnerships with international actors. UNDP coordination and collaboration with other United Nations entities, most notably with MINUSCA, has been uneven and has impacted the performance of the country office electoral support and livelihoods interventions. Furthermore, despite initial efforts to design joint projects with other United Nations agencies, most notably through the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF), implementation has often been fragmented thus missing the opportunity to capitalize on potential synergies. UNDAF+ was designed to be implemented following the ‘Delivering as One’ approach, and move towards an effective HDN approach. The UNDP CPD and abovementioned interventions are fully aligned with UNDAF+, which itself is aligned to RCPCA 2017-2021.123 However, the evaluation noted that the United Nations, UNDP and MINUSCA often faced challenges in effectively coordinating their actions in certain areas of their work. For example, United Nations policy requires integrated electoral support from the outset in a mission context, even if the mission and United Nations country team are not structurally integrated.124 UNDP election assistance was thus conceptualized as an integrated effort with the electoral division of MINUSCA in its design, as recommended by the 2018 Needs Assessment Mission and United Nations policy. This was not reflected in implementation, however, and coordination remained problematic throughout much of the process, though improving outwardly following a joint EAD-UNDP mission in late 2020 that looked at this issue. The efforts of both were fragmented, with systemic coordination issues raised throughout interviews. PAPEC had difficulties using MINUSCA offices in the field, and intermittent issues with the delivery of cash for paying election workers using MINUSCA flights and field presence which in one case required UNDP to charter a plane. The evaluation also noted coordination issues among CSO partners, as well as with ANE, MINUSCA and the Ministry of Territorial Decentralization for voter sensitization, who felt that meetings needed to be more regular to improve effectiveness, noting that one CSO team had to be evacuated from Berberati to Bangui by air after armed groups blocked the roads. This situation could have been avoided, and the evacuation done sooner, if there had been better coordination between UNDP and MINUSCA. While the financial contribution of MINUSCA to UNDP elections projects was relatively small (2 percent of total expenditure, with the EU providing nearly 60 percent), the picture is different for the rule of law portfolio where the MINUSCA contribution corresponds to 18 percent of current expenditure. This coincides with a more constructive and coherent working relationship, in which collaboration with MINUSCA was seen as a key factor in expanding the geographical reach of interventions in the justice and security sectors. However, the unclear distribution of roles and responsibilities from the outset (as seen in the project documents), inefficient communication and unsatisfactory visibility of projects were often mentioned by partners, including donors, as factors hampering the partnership. Collaboration between UNDP and MINUSCA around livelihood interventions (Output 1.3), although limited in scope, was nonetheless perceived as positive by consulted stakeholders and was a facilitating factor in reaching the hardest-to-reach.
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Some CPD indicators were modified in 2018 after noting a certain misalignment with the UNDAF+ as well as inadequacies in the type of indicators initially established. United Nations Focal Point for Electoral Assistance, Policy, Principles and Types of Electoral Assistance. P. 15.
CHAPTER 2. Findings
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