International Issues

UNICEF Another United Nations Boondoggle

Critics say UNICEF -- the United Nations Children's Fund -- is no longer the effective organization it was 30 years ago, when resources were "directed towards promoting sanitation, the control of specific diseases such as malaria, yaws, tuberculosis, and trachoma, and improved child nutrition."

By the 1990s, say observers, UNICEF had become a bloated UN bureaucracy:

  • Administrative costs for "regional offices" and headquarters is $346 million -- more than a third of the approximately $1 billion budget.

  • This doesn't include spending on UNICEF's 210 field offices or the organization's "national committees," which raise 35 percent of the agency's budget and keep 25 percent to 40 percent of what they raise to cover their own administrative expenses.

  • An independent audit in 1994 by Booz, Allen, & Hamilton found bloated overhead costs, lack of financial control and a proclivity for luxury travel accommodations and overstaffing.

  • There has also been corruption, with UNICEF's Nairobi, Kenya staff accused of stealing $1 million in relief funds and wasting $8 million to $9 million more.

But the real scandal, according to some, is that UNICEF is issuing medically unsound advice. It is actively discouraging use of prepared infant formula in Africa, even though studies suggest that around 14 percent of uninfected babies could acquire an HIV infection if breast-fed by their HIV-positive mothers. One South African study, reported in the New York Times, put the risk at 28 percent.

Source: Nicholas Eberstadt (American Enterprise Institute and Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies), "Trick and Mistreat," New Republic, November 10, 1997.

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