According to a BBC article, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is an tangled mess, this admitted by the UNDP’s own investigators.
The failures and violations constitute include:
Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.
Children in post-conflict areas are being abused by the people there to look after them, says Save the Children. Save the Children says that most of the sexual abuse goes unreported and unpunished because the children are too frightened to speak out.
After research in Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, Save the Children proposed that an international watchdog be set up.
On the local levels it appears that the UNDP does business with organizations the U.N. has condemned for terrorist ties. UNDP country offices find the current system of cross-checking with U.N. terrorist lists to be ineffective.
The UNDP has no formal policy for suspending vendors for poor performance or corruption. It doesn’t ask new vendors the identity of their owners or establish other corporate ties. Corrupt vendors can simply switch names and reapply for approved status.
In countries where the UNDP is working, the social systems are family, clan and tribal based. Corruption is difficult to root out since family members protect one another.
A UN spokesman, Nick Birnback, spoke of the difficulty in trying to ensure "zero incidents" within an organization of 200,000 personnel serving around the world.
Read it all here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7420798.stm
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