The United Nations annual report revealed that while the UN produces over 1,000 reports every year, they are hardly read by the people. The latest study was conducted to find out how its work could be made more 'impactful and coherent.' The revelation came as the UN is marking its 80th anniversary.
In March, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched the UN80 Task Force, a new initiative launched to review how the Secretariat executes thousands of commands while reducing administrative overload.
According to the report released earlier this week, the Secretariat published 1,100 reports last year—a 20 per cent increase since 1990 – and supported 27,000 meetings involving 240 entities. Guterres said on Friday, “The number of meetings and administrative overload is not only pushing the system but all of us to the breaking point.
“The sheer number of meetings and reports is pushing the system—and all of us—to the breaking point,” Guterres said during a briefing on Friday. According to stats shared by the agency, the majority of their data is not widely read. Only the top five per cent are downloaded more than 5,500 times, while one in five reports receive fewer than 1,000 downloads, and downloading doesn’t necessarily mean reading.
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There are various reasons associated with this particular trend that the United Nations study has skipped, which is that the majority of the people in the world are not familiar with the work the UN does. The very basic problem is that the United Nations is widely accessed through indirect means.
One particular example is that all important reports are widely quoted by the international media, and thus, it becomes an indirect source that might have confused the evaluators of the study. The agency, which has played a critical role in stabilising international order, was founded by the Soviet Union, the United States, the UK, France, and China.
The organisation initially had 51 members and was created to prevent wars and promote cooperation. Now with 193 member states, the UN faces what many experts describe as a credibility crisis. Guterres has pushed back, insisting that “our values have never been more relevant.”
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