United Nations Industrial Development Organization
The United Nations Industrial Development Organization, UNIDO, was established by the General Assembly in 1966 as the body responsible for promoting and accelerating industrialization in countries Developing. It is also known by its acronym in English: UNIDO.
Its status as a specialized agency was established in 1979 but it became a fully autonomous agency on January 1, 1986.
UNIDO encourages cooperation between industrialized and developing countries to accelerate industrial development by stimulating investment promotion and technology transfer activities.
Industrialized and developing countries jointly examine ways to accelerate industrialization, encouraging government and industrial involvement. Based on surveys and studies, UNIDO creates and refines development concepts and approaches; It contributes to formulating the plans of the public, cooperative and private sectors, including the promotion of cooperation between the companies interested in those sectors.
In addition, it organizes industrial training programs, offers advisory services and helps countries to obtain external financing under equitable and fair conditions, and collects, analyzes, publishes, standardizes and improves industrial statistics.
The headquarters of this entity belonging to the United Nations system are located in Vienna.
Organization
The organizational structure of the UN (UNIDO) is as follows:
- General Conference: all member States participate and meet every two years to approve the budget and programme of work, and elect a general director (every four years).
- Industrial Development Board: meets once in the years of the General Conference and twice in the alternate years; it consists of 53 representatives of member States elected for a period of four years by the Conference on equitable geographical distribution criteria and is responsible for making recommendations to the General Conference and reviewing the implementation of the programme and budget.
- Programme and Budget Committee: meets once a year and its task is to assist the Board in preparing the programme, budget and other financial matters.
- Secretariat: is headed by a general director elected for a period of four years (since 2013, Li Yong of the People ' s Republic of China) and deals with all administrative matters of the Organization.
Strategic priorities
Creating Shared Prosperity
UNIDO focuses its efforts on agro-industry development, increasing the participation of women and youth in productive activities, and human security in post-crisis situations. The Organization's services for the development of agro-industries focus on adding value to agricultural production by strengthening the links between agriculture, industry and markets.
UNIDO supports the transformation of businesses from the informal to the formal sector, with a particular focus on simplifying and improving access to business registration administrative services. It also strives to improve the participation of women in business activities. Drawing on its experience in post-crisis and human security programs and projects, UNIDO responds to complex emergencies through activities that contribute to socio-economic, environmental and energy security at both the national and local levels.
Advancing economic competitiveness
UNIDO supports investment and technology promotion programmes, SME development, trade capacity building, and entrepreneurship development.
UNIDO provides advisory services to improve the business and political environment of the private sector, helping to build productive capacities. Its programs support investment and technology opportunities to help companies, especially SMEs, improve productivity and innovation, and achieve systemic competitive advantages. Relying on a strong global network aimed at fostering investment, technology and other partnership opportunities, UNIDO seeks to enable SMEs to take advantage of their unique dynamism and flexibility, reinforcing synergies between companies and with supporting institutions.
In the context of trade capacity-building programmes, UNIDO strengthens international trade rules and regulations by helping developing countries and economies in transition to improve their production and processing systems to increase the quality of products. local products, particularly through the adoption of improved technologies, and help them adjust to the standards required by international markets. UNIDO builds the capacity of public and private institutions to formulate trade policies and strategies based on economic and statistical analyses, as well as benchmarking competitive performance at the sector and product level and supporting the creation of databases related to trade, such as the inventories of technical barriers to trade (OTC), whose objective is to expand the exports of the industrial sector.
Environmental protection
UNIDO supports countries in their environmental stewardship efforts, including the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements and the provision of sustainable energy. Help create new green industries by establishing national supply chain greening roadmaps, setting benchmarks and indicators, disseminating and sharing best practices, running clean technology programmes, conducting various business building exercises capacity and contributing to international forums with the necessary research and knowledge.
The Organization's services include capacity building, direct technical support to companies and assistance to government institutions on clean production policy issues, as well as the promotion, adaptation and transfer of green technologies and the application of advanced LP business models such as chemical leasing.
Strengthen knowledge and institutions
Strengthening knowledge and institutions is a priority result that ranks above other high-level results. It outlines the organization's strategic direction towards strengthening the knowledge base for inclusive and sustainable industrial development at the project, programme, country and international levels, as well as institutional capacity at the technical, policy and regulatory levels.
Historical context
Origin
The origins of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) can be traced back to a series of studies on a rapid industrialization program for developing countries carried out by the United Nations Secretariat in early the 1950s at the request of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC). These studies culminated in a work program on industrialization and productivity drawn up by the Secretary General of the United Nations in 1956 and endorsed the following year by ECOSOC and the General Assembly. At that time, it was suggested for the first time that a special body be set up to deal with the problems of industrialization, whose political organs could relieve ECOSOC and the General Assembly of the detailed examination of such questions and whose secretariat could do more work. substantive than the current Industry Section of the Office of Economic Affairs of the Secretariat. The Industry Section of the Secretariat became a branch in 1959, and in 1962 it became the Center for Industrial Development, headed by a Commissioner for Industrial Development.
Special Organ of the United Nations
Subsequently, various consultative groups and inter-agency bodies considered proposals to further institutionalize industrial development issues within the UN. Subsequently, the General Assembly of the United Nations created UNIDO in November 1966 as a special organ of the United Nations. In January 1967, the Organization was formally established with its headquarters in Vienna, Austria. Compared with the Industrial Development Centre, the creation of UNIDO was intended to expand on the work of its predecessor. In addition to normative activities, such as acting as a discussion forum, analytical functions and information dissemination, UNIDO became involved in operational activities, ie technical cooperation activities.
Conversion into a specialized agency
The creation of UNIDO as a specialized body was, however, a compromise solution. Developing countries (the Group of 77) had first promoted the idea of a specialized agency with its own governing bodies for political decision-making and autonomy in budgetary matters. This same stance was advocated by various high-level think tanks and intergovernmental committees over the following years. In the context of the adoption by the General Assembly of the Declaration and Program of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, the second UNIDO General Conference, held in 1975 in Lima, Peru, adopted the Lima Declaration on Industrial Development and Cooperation. For the first time, industrial development goals were quantified internationally: the Lima Goal it provided that developing countries would reach a quota of twenty-five percent of world industrial production by the year 2000. As part of the institutional provisions of the Lima Action Plan, and in order to contribute to the establishment of a New International Economic Order, it was recommended to the General Assembly that UNIDO become a specialized agency.
An intergovernmental committee prepared a draft constitution, which was approved in Vienna in 1979. However, objections and doubts from industrialized countries about the need for a specialized agency contributed to delaying the ratification process. To ensure that the new organization was launched with a membership that included substantially all significant States, the General Assembly, by resolutions adopted in 1982 and 1984, called for a series of formal consultations among prospective member States, which ultimately led to a general agreement for the new UNIDO Constitution to enter into force. All the necessary formal requirements were met in 1985, and in December of the same year, UNIDO finally became the 16th Vienna-based specialized agency of the United Nations.
Crisis and reform during the 1990s
During the following years, UNIDO did not stop expanding, above all, its operational activities. However, various events, both outside and within the Organization, led to a crisis, which reached a breaking point in 1997, when UNIDO faced the risk of closure: Following the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the market economic system over the command economic system, and in view of the Washington Consensus limiting the role of industrial policy in economic development processes, some Member States considered that industrial development could be supported more effectively and efficiently by the private sector. As a result, Canada, the United States (UNIDO's largest donor at the time) and Australia withdrew from the Organization between 1993 and 1997. Simultaneously, the continued slowdown in the economies of some of the major industrialized countries, as well as the financial turmoil in the 1997 Asian financial crisis, led to a decline in multilateral development aid. In addition, the weak management structure and the lack of orientation and integration of UNIDO's activities contributed to aggravate the crisis.
UNIDO Member States responded by adopting a rigorous Blueprint of Business on the future role and functions of the Organization in June 1997. The activities set out in the Blueprint of Business are based on the clear comparative advantages of the UNIDO, while avoiding overlap and duplication with other multilateral institutions. A key point was that activities should be integrated into service packages, rather than delivered in isolation. The Organization radically reformed itself on the basis of this business plan and streamlined its services, human and financial resources, as well as internal processes over the following years.
Post-reform feature
Building on sound finances and a second wave of programmatic reforms in 2004, UNIDO further focused its activities and technical services in direct response to international development priorities. In an independent evaluation of 23 international organizations against a large number of criteria, UNIDO was evaluated as the 6th best overall and as the best in the group of specialized agencies. Regarding the current [when?] Reform of the United Nations, it can be seen that UNIDO is actively contributing to the coherence and cost efficiency of the entire United Nations system.
Languages of the institution
The constitution of this organization approved in Vienna on April 8, 1979 is written in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, English and Russian, the texts of which are considered “authentic” in article 29 thereof. These are the languages used in the institution and in which all its working texts are interpreted.
Funding
In 2012, according to the UNIDO status report, spending on technical cooperation programs amounted to $189 million, and headquarters spending amounted to $77 million. Funding comes from membership fees and voluntary contributions to projects. In 2013, the largest contributors to these projects were Japan ($16.7 million), the European Union ($13.9 million), and Switzerland ($11.5 million). France contributed $1.5 million.