14
Examination of witnesses
Manuel Mattiat, Rana Ghoneim and Jason Slater.
Q1 The Chair: We are extremely pleased to welcome the three of you today to talk about UNIDO, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and our rejoining of that organisation. For the benefit of my colleagues, presenting evidence today we have Manuel Mattiat, director and chef de cabinet at the Office of the Chef de Cabinet of UNIDO; Rana Ghoneim, director of the Division of Energy and Climate Action at UNIDO; and Jason Slater, director of the Division of Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence at UNIDO. Thank you very much indeed for spending some time with us today.
We have a variety of different questions. The purpose of this committee is to make effective recommendations and scrutinise all treaties and agreements that the UK Government enter into. This is a very interesting opportunity for us to hear from you about the background as to why we are re-entering this organisation. Some peripheral comments around that will be very helpful since it will enable us to come to a good conclusion in the report that we will write, and potentially a debate we may hold on the matter. I will ask Lord German to begin and ask the first question.
Lord German: This is a what-has-changed question. Essentially what I would like to understand is what you have done since the UK withdrew that has solved the UK’s withdrawal problems. In other words, what answers have you put in place to the issues that were important to the UK at the time that it withdrew? It is a fairly open question but it really spans a period of years and I am hoping you can tell us what has happened.
Manuel Mattiat: My Lords, it is a great honour for us to be here; it is not day-to-day business for us to appear in the House of Lords in London. Bear with us if we are a little nervous or intimidated but we will try to answer your questions as faithfully and diligently as possible. Thank you very much for this opportunity to appear and clarify.
I have been with the organisation for roughly the past 10 years; I joined just around the time of the UK withdrawal so I have a little history. It is unusual for the chef de cabinet to be an insider. Normally these executive positions are brought in by the then director-general and they leave again. This time we wanted someone who knows the organisation a little from the inside out, who was in the field in different positions and in headquarters, so maybe that can give you a little perspective on what has changed.
Unlike other decisions for countries to withdraw—it is not only the UK; there have been others before such as the US, the major member state, leaving in the 1990s, which had huge budget implications—the UK decision was very rationally explained. There were not so many political or financial reasons as in other cases, or low-hanging fruit; it was very well assessed. There was a pillar assessment done and then clear recommendations and conclusions in terms of alignment with UK priorities, our results reporting, our results-based management, and not so much to see the impact and the value for money.
What we have seen since then—I have experienced it first hand—is what was never really put in doubt. Even the UK assessment back then, which was quite critical, was about the relevance of the mandate: to bring industrial development to developing countries and emerging economies, to build processing capacities, to bring value addition, to foster trade and agribusiness, and bring energy solutions to developing countries and emerging economies. The mandate is such that you need those technical mandates; that was never a question, but rather it was the efficiency of the organisation.
This is where we have worked very hard in the last few years, especially when this current Administration came in four years ago, led by a former German Minister who—in a sense, to be open—was even quite UN-sceptical. He came with quite a private sector sense of how UN organisations should be run. He undertook two restructurings of the secretariat, generally referred to in house as shock therapies. With the advice of business consultancies abroad, we really looked at all our different business areas, how our back-office functions, financial management, procurement, HR and talent management work.
There are a number of recommendations coming out of this where we really restructured, reformed and cut a whole layer of hierarchy—without letting anyone go, we were just not replacing retirees. In effect, we were strengthening, doing these administrative reforms and putting emphasis on some new priority areas from zero hunger and food security to energy. Our colleagues here can give you a little more insight into some project work on sustainable supply chains. We have become a more efficient implementer.
In a nutshell, within these four years we have tripled our funds mobilisation coming into the organisation from partners such as the UK. The UK has become our second largest donor, which is very impressive and there are very good reasons why it sees the win-win in this. Many others are joining and it is tripling in this context. Around us, the UN is under scrutiny, downsizing and cutting jobs; we are almost against the trend. Perhaps if you allow me later, we can get into some specifics of why this is the case.
In this period we have also doubled our technical delivery and implementation on the ground. This has always been a phenomenon with UNIDO; an observation in the review back then was that, for all these years—even when we had twice as much staff in the 1990s when the US was still a member—we have always done the same technical co-operation implementation yearly, around £180 million to £190 million. It never changed during, before or after Covid. No matter the staff, this delivery figure never changed and we have doubled it in the last four years. This year, for the first time, we will get to £400 million for delivery. This is only possible because of changing certain structures: how we decentralise our procurement and how we use our field network and implementing partners to get projects on the ground much faster. I do not want to go on too long, but a few steps have changed in making the organisation more efficient and having more delivery partners.
What was fair—this may be the last point on this—is that in the UK case you had a very good, thorough assessment done, with a very rational explanation of the shortcomings. We were put on our feet to change and then the Government decided to give us a test case project and said, “You talk about these reforms, efficiency, technical co-operation optimisation, talent management and financial management, which is what we want to see”.
In an organisation that had done a lot of pilot projects—around £2 million to £3 million in different technical areas—we received £80 million back then, which has since been increased to about £140 million because it was done very well. Maybe our DESNZ colleagues will also elaborate on this, but this partnership has really worked quite well in the practical terms of how fast we deliver and how agile our systems are, but also in terms of the results. The biggest point, at least that our Director-General always stresses, is that we have opened the organisation up since that assessment, especially to private business. This is something that is quite unique for UNIDO in this whole UN space. We often talk about it—private sector consultations and involvement—but the real business opportunity with our projects is to get a foot in the door in markets that maybe traditionally the UK or other countries had not really worked in. We are the partner to bring technology, know-how and companies to some partner countries. This particular UK project example was a very good test case; it is actually not just aid or charity on its own, but is a good business case that we can sell at home.
That is generally the trend we see a little around us. You asked why we tripled funds mobilisation. We have a few cases where member states come to us, even very critical Governments that are really critical of the UN and how the UN works, and they pull out funds from other organisations. We see it especially in Vienna with the Atomic Energy Agency and the Office on Drugs and Crime. They say, “We want this money to go to UNIDO”.
We had a recent example on an energy efficiency project. Of course we are happy about this trend, but we always ask why it is and this is because we can justify to our taxpayers much more clearly that there is a clear business interest. If we work with UNIDO we get into very interesting markets in Africa, Latin America and Asia, which this partnership allows. Maybe in a nutshell there are a number of reforms and administrative reorganisations that were not easy and were painful but that we have overcome. We are growing; we have really tripled our mobilisation, doubled our technical co-operation delivery and are on a very good financial footing, but there is much more to be done in terms of business and innovation. There are perhaps a lot of areas we can touch on that we want to do together with the United Kingdom to move to the future now.
The Chair: Thank you very much; that was very helpful. It is appropriate to bring your colleagues in for the next question, but we have a supplementary to this question first.
Q2 Baroness Verma: Like many in this committee, I visit developing nations all the time. I struggle to see why we still have such little investment going into the energy sector from the private and public sectors in those developing nations. I just came back from the DRC last week and large swathes of that country are still without electricity of any kind. While I understand you have made some reforms, I am slightly puzzled about where and how your resources are actually being targeted and how you are measuring outcomes with the private sector. Currently—particularly travelling across the African continent—I do not see much of that happening.
Rana Ghoneim: It is an absolute honour for me to be here and thank you so much for that question. Indeed, if we look at the investments that are flowing into the energy sector, only a handful of countries are benefiting. Unfortunately in least developed countries and small island states, there is still a dire need for more investments to flow there.
There are a number of things that are happening and I always like to relate it to how UNIDO is influencing global trends. For example, we host annual and biannual fora where we discuss financial flows to support the energy sector, because this is not going to happen overnight; we also need a redirection of the financial flows. At the same time, at the national level, we are championing what we call industrial transformation investment plans or platforms, where we try to identify the opportunities for development. I come from a developing country, and energy is not just about providing lighting: it is about comfort and industrial development. That is what UNIDO uniquely brings here; we bring the fact that energy is a backbone but industry is the engine that is going to transform this into development opportunities. That is very much the narrative that now—under the leadership of our Director-General—we are trying to bring to developing countries.
To give you an example, we are working with west Africa through the presidency of Sierra Leone on developing economic corridors that will help Africa in the beneficiation of minerals. We are moving away from looking at energy just through its access dimension to energy as a transformational opportunity for industrial development.
Baroness Verma: The frustration is that, while you may do the macro-industrial picture, most of those countries are dependent on very small industries developing and that is not happening because they cannot get energy at all. Sometimes we need to look at the discussion point the other way around and start where the growth can actually happen with the local people, on the ground.
Q3 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: You very helpfully set out the reforms that have been introduced in the last few years in terms of finance, HR and the way you operate. Of course, it is no secret that all UN institutions are under very severe pressure at the moment, particularly on contributions. What contribution is UNIDO making to the work that the Secretary-General of the UN has put in hand to reduce both the number of civil servants and some programmes, if there simply is not enough money to go to them all?
Manuel Mattiat: UN80 is a very important exercise in the wider UN context. The current Secretary-General has kicked it off, which is calling us all to reform. In a way—perhaps also because of the UK decision back in 2012 and others—we had to do a lot of the work already. We were put on our feet before the US policies kicked in and some challenges have become apparent now. This is how we have pre-empted some of the shocks.
Our role in this current reform process—this is a very useful exercise for us all—is to be very specific about who is good at what. With the review of mandates and what we see, sometimes there is a bit of a blurred area of what the comparative advantage of which agency is and what the difference between us and UNDP or FAO is, and I have seen it enough when I was working in the field and UN country teams.
The first job that we had to do in this whole review process, in being part of various working groups at New York level, was to be very honest about who is good at what and fleshing out what the different mandates and value additions are of each agency. That has helped us and brought us to something that they call expertise on demand, which at least at the country level—when you look at how the UN is organised—should technically lead to a much more programmatic approach where not everyone is doing the same thing but there is better co-ordination of who is good at what.
One particular thing that is important for us in the next steps of our own reform is to be very honest about what the internal structures are that we are duplicating from other agencies. Why can we not use the procurement services of agencies that are much better at this, whether it is UNOPS or the WFP Innovation unit, where we have agencies? In this consultation with others, at least being around the table with them has allowed us to define that these will be the next steps of our reform process: to really see whether we need to inflate our own human resources and the way we deal with contracts, consultants’ contracts and payrolls. There are a number of services that maybe other partners are better and faster at, and we have quite an honest, objective view on this: what could be outsourced and maybe reduced in our own secretariat that others are better at?
This is one part of this UN80 reform, at least. It is a lot of talking for now. It is a bit of a UN phenomenon that we have working groups, a lot of reports and assessments on the mandates and other phenomena. The next step, “How do we change?” is usually missing. At least in our organisation we are programmatically very clear about what we are good at, what industrial development means, how we are aligned with SDG 9 and a few other things.
The most interesting part of this whole UN reform is more about the services and the back office functions. We have a WFP team working with us on procurement and field decentralisation; their field offices are much more operational than ours for instance. Why is it that they do much more decentralised procurement than us? Why do they have many more staff in the field than us? We are very headquarter-centred.
For us it is almost an honest reflection. To have everyone around the table and share from different agencies what they are good at and how we could subcontract rather than use any other outside consultancy firms et cetera to help us with some back office functions had not happened so much. For us, at least, this is the most interesting part of the reform process. We see how it will carry on with the next Secretary-General coming in, but we should all be honest about what the duplications are among us and we are often doing the same thing. Who is good at what, and what are the back office functions where we really can have one agency that is good at HR, procurement and financial management while we are bringing the technical work? We have the engineers, economists and policy researchers, but we might not be the best HR specialists for instance. This is a good discussion—at least for us coming out of this UN80—where we will reduce some core back office functions to use other UN agencies.
Jason Slater: I would like to give you a very good practical example of UN80 and the reform actually being implemented. We developed a partnership with UNOOSA, the space agency. We recognise that industrial development is very much going to be reliant upon connectivity and access to space and geospatial data and how you can then connect that to industry, even linking to some climate challenges in terms of early warning systems—a key thing that the Secretary-General mentioned at London Climate Action Week. Thanks to our director-general, we established a partnership with UNOOSA and are now developing joint projects and programmes. It is known as Space4Industry but it is a good, practical example of two agencies recognising how they can complement and together amplify their impact through capturing geospatial data and using new and emerging technology through artificial intelligence and digital twins to actually be able to have early warning systems to mitigate industrial zones against climate action. I just felt that it would be useful to highlight a very good practical example of the UN80 reform at work between UNIDO and another UN agency.
The Chair: This leads us nicely to Lord Stevenson’s question, which will then open up more about the exact work that you are doing. I am sure my colleagues will have questions on that.
Q4 Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: From a perspective of the organisation itself, we have talked a bit about what you have been doing, but you mentioned in that process that you have gained some money from the UK and you have been using that. It would be helpful—perhaps it flows back to the earlier question—if you could give us two or three concrete examples of what has happened on the ground with UK money to give us a sense of what it is that actually happens as a result of all this activity.
Rana Ghoneim: There are a number of things on which we have been working with the UK. First, on the global stage, we have been working on a topic that is setting standards for carbon accounting in steel and cement. That is quite an important dimension because, by leveraging the expertise of the UK but also industry knowledge—in this case steel and cement—we are working together on influencing global standards and carbon accounting, which are essential for global trade.
At the same time, we have a lot of pragmatic, on-the-ground examples where we are working on almost marrying the innovation ecosystems between the UK and Brazil. Again, in relation to steel and cement decarbonisation, we are working with Brazil on setting out its road map for industrial decarbonisation, identifying its investment needs but also its innovation needs, and then linking that to the innovation ecosystem here in the UK. We are bringing universities and SMEs to support Brazil in its decarbonisation pathway.
A third example is through the A2D—Accelerate-to-Demonstrate—Facility. This is a global facility. Usually, we commission global calls. This is very much an on-demand facility in which we are really supporting some of the first, ground-breaking projects in developing countries. To give you an example, we are really helping Namibia to start its first hydrogen production programme. Hydrogen might seem like hype in some cases but, through the support that we have had from the UK, we are actually making it happen in Namibia. Other examples include biogasification in the tea industry in Kenya. These are all pragmatic examples in which we are again bringing UK technology and know-how and implementing it in developing countries for productive use. I am happy to provide more examples if needed.
Q5 Lord Boateng: Over the years—actually several decades—the UK taxpayer has invested large sums in developing food security and seeking to create jobs through linking farmers to agricultural processing in the developing world and through that into global markets. Can you give us one or more practical examples of how the work of UNIDO, perhaps linked with the FAO or other UN organisations, has contributed? You mentioned that space science and intelligence about weather through space science has contributed to that effort and to enhancing the productivity of African smallholder farmers.
If you do not have some practical examples of how they have done that that you can share with this committee, could you please write to us about it? We have a real challenge in the UK—indeed there is a real challenge globally—in demonstrating just what difference the UK taxpayer’s money makes to ordinary people on the ground in the developing world.
Jason Slater: I may respond to that with a very practical example—a project in my own portfolio in Ghana. I want to link it back to the conversation around what is going on in ECOWAS in west Africa. Roughly around 50% of rice is imported and, of what it produces itself, we analysed and realised that around 20% was being lost post-harvest. What can we do practically for the farmers as a UN agency with the private sector, importantly?
To leverage new and emerging technology, over the last six months we have developed a very practical tool that sits in the hand of the farmer, where they can scan the rice and actually track and trace where the actual production problems and errors are occurring. We have managed to demonstrate that already, within six months, this is reducing the loss from 20% to 13%. Of course, we hope to achieve much more and are looking to see how we can now replicate that across all the other countries within west Africa.
Very specifically, this project was not funded by the United Kingdom—it was funded by Japan—and we are now looking to replicate it elsewhere. But it specifically demonstrates how, by harnessing the local innovation ecosystem, working with the local farmers and bringing in the private sector, you can use new and emerging technology to solve some clear challenges around food security.
Baroness Verma: Can I just make a suggestion? Alongside the technology, agronomists are the greatest asset that any local community can have. They understand the soil better than anybody. While your technology may be helpful, you could eradicate it 100% by making sure the agronomists are there in the mix.
Q6 The Chair: This all sounds very good. I am personally a believer that private enterprise is the one that solves most of these issues rather than the state. We already have a very large development office attached to the Foreign Office, which must spend many billions. I am sure you do great work so I am not making this as a comment to your phenomenal agents on the ground. What are you doing that we are not doing or that we cannot do? That is what I want to understand. We are your biggest contributor so we are already working through you. We have an enormous aid department doing hopefully good things. Why do we need to rejoin the organisation? I am not quite sure what the additional benefits are. As I said, what are you doing that we cannot do in a helpful way? That is the question we are going to get asked.
Manuel Mattiat: Maybe I will start and then my colleagues can complement as well. This is a question that all our member states are asking us and you are almost echoing our Director-General. It is a bit like what Baroness Verma and Lord Boateng said: whenever we travel, he wants to see concrete actions. What have we done? Not just talking about it; what have we done and how are we different?
First, there is a large network of other partners that we work with. Recently we had a very similar discussion. For instance Japan is giving us £200 million for Ukraine’s recovery, which is a big project we have just started. Japan did a very clear analysis that these are very interesting growth markets with organisations such as us and the contacts with the Government, the local network and office experts working on the ground. We have a strong network with the municipalities, mayors, et cetera. They can use our network to get a foot in the door for companies in different areas that are interesting to their economy, from 3D printing to a whole array of companies that are interested in venturing into that market. We have this route. Italy is giving us a substantial amount of money; it is third under the UK in terms of voluntary contributions. Japan is the largest and the UK is the second largest.
Italy has a very strong interest in the coffee value chain, for instance. That is where companies such as Illy and Lavazza come to us and say, “We are very interested in the sustainability of your supply chains. We need to show this to consumers. It’s with your UNIDO blue flag if you want—your objective certification that this is fair and corresponding to certain environmental standards—that this is really helping us businesses such as Illy or Lavazza to sell more coffee because that is what the consumers want to see.”
In the UK case there are also very particular examples of markets in countries where traditionally companies did not have a foot in the door. They feel like bilateral channels might not be enough but we can bring more value addition with our network, expertise and workforce with different talents in the house. We can help them settle in some markets. Maybe Rana has another more practical example in the A to D context.
The Chair: I know Baroness Lawlor has a question going back to the resources. We seem to already be working through you. The question is why do we need to formally join? It sounds like we have a very good arrangement. We are using you as an agency. This is a question that will be asked, as I say: why do we actually have to join UNIDO?
Manuel Mattiat: This is more the political element for us. The interest will be—for DESNZ colleagues perhaps the complement is—if you are already one of the biggest contributors financially speaking, you want to have a say in the governing bodies as well. You are already the largest contributor but not formally a stakeholder. The UN organisation still has its specificity, constitution, budget committees and, in our case, industrial development board, our advisory board. It passes resolutions on all sorts of policy issues from women empowerment and gender to food security. It is very important to have the UK’s voice heard in terms of the principles and values that you also bring along.
It is just simply to have more due diligence in the whole oversight of how the money is spent. It is much better to be part of the system and these policy-making organs than to merely be a contributor and not have any control basically over how the governance of the organisation is run. It is simply mainly in terms of accountability. Perhaps also to further enlighten on this point of DESNZ, if the membership fee is such a small share compared to the overall volume of voluntary contributions and it found a formula to do this within existing resources, it is almost a no-brainer in a way to become a member as well, have a stake in the organisation, hold us accountable—the DG, myself and the management team in our board meetings—to ask exactly what you said, “We want to see the impact. We want to see the project examples. We want to see what we are getting for our money.” It is much more difficult to do it from the outside basically, as if you are not part of the governance structure.
Q7 Baroness Lawlor: You have told us already—really very fluently—how you have improved administration efficiency. You have gone in as the new broom and you have resolved many problems on account of which Britain left. Really following on from what colleagues have said, I cannot see, and I do not think from what we have heard, that there is any good reason for joining except becoming part of a talking shop with other people on getting the work done for the villages and businesses that need electricity and still do not have it.
I hear what you say about getting stakeholders and universities and so on involved in decarbonisation discussions and projects, but the reality is that the members here are concerned that the money we are spending to get things done and help these countries is not actually making such a difference. Running water is not available in many parts of the world. If we spearhead that project through our agencies—working with a sector that we know will deliver—why is that not better value for the British taxpayer, who is keen to help but does not want to see the money wasted on an agency that has lots of officials, and despite your administrative reforms, is still problematic?
The Chair: I do not know if any of your colleagues want to answer these questions. We are doing this to try to understand because we are going to be asked. Why are we joining you?
Manuel Mattiat: This is really from personal experience. I spent many years in the field in very rural areas to see the difference it makes working with UNIDO on very specific issues because it is tangible work. At the end of a project implementation we can prove how many jobs were created and how income and communities have changed. When I spent years in west Africa—sometimes in war zones or post-conflict countries—we would work with young entrepreneurs and ex-combatants on getting them into jobs and providing vocational training to give up arms and go into vocational training programmes.
I worked in Chad in the middle of nowhere where there had never been any electricity access. We built solar-powered mini-grids in that example. In Madagascar we worked on small hydropower systems. To see the use of this energy access for irrigation systems, health clinics and food processing units, you had a direct result of what our technical solution or project was. I always found this part of UNIDO’s work very tangible, practical and clear.
What we are missing a bit since then and the assessment then is that we did this on a pilot case. We had small projects. A bit like what you said, it is a drop in the ocean; it is a small project and we are missing the scale. You made the point earlier that public money cannot do it alone. Compared with the projects we were doing then, the average project of £2 million now becomes £200 million because the private sector is involved. You cannot imagine the impact and scale that we are reaching now.
I am happy to provide you perhaps with some more examples but it is a completely different ballgame that we have reached now. At least from a personal perspective I find it very satisfying and not as abstract as maybe other players or organisations that produce more reports, papers, strategies, action plans, ambitious programmes and agendas but really are missing this tangible work. At least in this short amount of time that we have I just want to get this point across.
Jason Slater: I just wanted to give you a practical example if I may. What is happening now in Ukraine—Manuel mentioned it—is that we have this large-scale programme funded by Japan on Ukraine’s green recovery. We have been working with FCDO back to the Foreign Office and Innovate Ukraine. Why did they reach out to us to establish a strategic working relationship? Because we have access on the ground and have established a regional set of co-ordinators in western Ukraine that FCDO did not have access to. It was investing in firms and developing certain technologies that then could not be replicated and scaled across.
By bringing it together with Japan and other partners such as Austria we discovered the impact that we can have together. This is not a transaction; this is simply about working together as a partnership and comes back to the value-for-money question that you were raising before. That is what I have experienced in the last six months alone working directly with FCDO and Innovate Ukraine partners, and seeing how we can bring that together with one of our large-scale programmes funded through Japan and some other funding partners in the European Union. That is a practical example where it clearly works and there is a benefit to both parties.
Baroness Lawlor: Is what you said not evidence that we would be better to continue to fund a project in which we have a mutual interest to get it done and see the results?
Jason Slater: My answer to that would be no because there is a next step. What happens when that project finishes? It leads to a comment before about investment. How can we leverage together? That is one reason that we established the finance coalition at London Climate Action Week: to see how we can try to leverage private financing to amplify the impact of the projects.
Q8 Lord Boateng: Would you accept that a failure to date in our whole approach to development globally has been the inability to scale up projects? Everyone around this table will be able to tell you about good projects that they have seen. What we need convincing of—what the world needs convincing of—is that agencies such as yourself have the means and focus on scaling up. Without that frankly, we will be here in 50 years’ time and will have missed, as we are going to miss actually, the UN Sustainable Development Goals. What we need in order to support your work is practical examples of how you have helped scaling up. That will assist us enormously.
The Chair: Baroness Bonham-Carter, is there a segue question to that?
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: I do not think people around this table are going to be surprised by my question on what you said about how it is better to be inside. Of course that is something that we have learned recently about another area. I am just interested in if you can convince my maybe more sceptical colleagues here what exactly you mean by that and that we are not just talking about getting caught up in bureaucracy.
The Chair: Can I just summarise a few questions that are very relevant? It seems like you are offering us the opportunity of scalability, which you cannot get as a single player. I would like to add a supplementary question to the three questions you have just been asked to make it even more complicated. It sounds like Gerd Müller has done a fabulous job but we left and we look like we are coming back. It seems like we are coming back because Gerd Müller seems to have a grip on things. What is to say that when he retires it does not go back to the same old, same old? This is a long-term commitment. If you could weave those into your answer as a summary answer or maybe I could ask you each to make a contribution as we summarise this session and come to a conclusion.
Manuel Mattiat: It is to be part of this growth story.
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: That is not a good answer.
Manuel Mattiat: I touched a little on being part of the governance structure and our policy-making organs having a say but there is much more beyond the project implementation. When you look at the partnership we have had before, we have still kept those ties. I myself spent my whole education years in the UK. We have a very strong partnership with Queen Elizabeth House at the University of Oxford on industrial policy research. We want to get business consultancy firms on the whole business innovation side of things. The UK has so much to offer.
If you are looking at the next steps of our reform that has led us to a good financial footing: we want to have a better RBM system and communications team now. We want to change our IT infrastructure. With all these topics, we are in touch with UK counterparts and would like to get them involved to help us further reform and strengthen the governance of this organisation. This is always tricky when you are not a member of the organisation. Other member states will not allow even subcontracts, procurement or any of this to happen if you are not a member. There is a case beyond pure technical co-operation; it is one arm but we also have a strong normative function and research industrial policy where the UK is a prime example of innovation and know-how research that we also need for ourselves. This is a little of what we are trying to do.
With regard to what comes next, I might not be around so I am not sure. At least from the perspective of someone I work with every day who has been very UN-sceptical and had his doubts—he is a very private sector-oriented person—what we have done in a few years is still very promising. I see how we are solicited in the whole UN system now. Before we were always looked at as a bit of an anomaly and very technical and not really part of the rest of the family. Now there are a lot of other UN agencies approaching us to learn and have more partnerships on the whole business innovation side of things. At least this trend would carry on. This is exactly a very good argument for the UK to be part of, to maybe ensure the sustainability of this trend, politically and technically speaking, and have your know-how with us for many more years to come. We are better off with you than alone.
The Chair: We would like to have a copy of that presentation that you brandished. We definitely want to read that.
Jason Slater: I have been in UNIDO longer than these two. I was there at the beginning and for a couple of DFID assessments and I have really seen the change that is happening under the leadership of our Director-General. I believe he is putting in a foundation that is beyond his own term. When you talk about the way that we work and embed ourselves with the private sector, we talk about the implementation modalities.
The reason we were doing small interventions and now we have the trust of our colleagues from DESNZ is that we are working through implementation patterns. You have to know what you are good at, where you need support and where you need to build up this consortium to help you have a bigger impact. As colleagues just said we all recognise that we are not there yet.
Last but not least is a recognition that in order for things to really progress we have to look at how to work with new financial instruments, whether that is private financing or establishing our own transformation fund. Those are three key things I have seen beyond the back office reforms and other things that Manuel has already brought in.
Rana Ghoneim: I would like to turn to the question especially on energy, and in this case what we see on the ground is that things are not scaling because demand for energy in rural communities is still low. This is where the industries are the ones that are going to provide the anchor load to make the business case, because at the end of the day we need to demonstrate that there is a business case for energy. Now what we are doing to ensure that there is scaling of finance is to help in preparing countries for bigger financial flows in terms of concessional funding and helping in preparing the private sector capital coming in because we cannot continue to work only with development finance. We need the private sector to come in and we need concessional financing. That is the alignment that we are trying to bring to make sure that we bring scale.
On the other side I would say you build institutions and there are plenty of people behind the institutions. One thing that the Director-General has been keen on is preparing leadership within the organisation and investing in training to have a lot of leaders within the organisation to help carry the legacy that he brings. We guarantee you that there is quite a lot of enthusiasm and motivation to keep flying the flag of this organisation, which is very much at the centre of a lot of what international collaboration focuses on at the moment in terms of industry, trade and energy.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. That has been hugely helpful. We appreciate your journey from Vienna to present to us today and are extremely grateful to you for that journey. On behalf of my colleagues in this committee, thank you very much and have a safe journey back home.
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: Please keep supporting Lavazza.
