November 13, 1997 | Read Time: 1 minute
‘The New Republic’: Problems at UNICEF Donors should think twice before contributing to UNICEF, writes Nicholas Eberstadt in The New Republic (November 10). “There are good reasons not to drop your change into the UNICEF box,” says Mr. Eberstadt, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute and at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
“Once justly renowned as a savior of hungry and sick kids,” he writes, “the organization has — like so much of the United Nations apparatus — degenerated into a corrupt, self-perpetuating bureaucracy.”
Many of the organization’s problems are financial and bureaucratic, Mr. Eberstadt writes. More than one-third of the organization’s $1-billion budget is spent on administrative costs, he reports. What’s more, he says, in many of the countries where UNICEF seeks charitable donations, the organizations that oversee the fund raising keep 25 to 40 per cent of the money to cover their own expenses instead of sending it to the international group.
In addition, Mr. Eberstadt writes, an independent audit of the organization found “bloated overhead costs” and a “lack of financial control.”
Mr. Eberstadt says such concerns have prompted several governments, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland, to call on UNICEF to do a better job of tracking its program and other costs. And the U.S. State Department last year asked UNICEF to cut back on its overhead and meetings, he writes.
Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, said in a letter to the magazine that Mr. Eberstadt had his financial figures wrong and did not incorporate into his assessment changes the organization has made since the audit was conducted.
