Summary
The present report, which covers the period from January to December 2015, is submitted pursuant to General Assembly resolution 63/282, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit an annual report on the Peacebuilding Fund.
The Peacebuilding Fund celebrated a number of milestones in 2015, including the launch of its first cross-border initiative along the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border and the allocation of over 15 per cent of investments to support women’s empowerment. Flexible management of the Fund in crisis-affected countries, including Burundi, Mali and Yemen and Ebola-affected countries, ensured that critical human rights and security initiatives were maintained in settings from which most donors had withdrawn their support. Despite these gains, waning finances have begun to limit the availability of funds to match demand.
As recognized by independent global reviews, sufficient and predictable resources for peacebuilding will be needed for the Peacebuilding Fund to continue to realize its universally recognized role of supporting early, high-risk peacebuilding and promoting system-wide coherence.
I. Introduction
- The present annual report, which covers the period from 1 January to 31 December 2015, is the sixth report submitted pursuant to General Assembly resolution 63/282. It will be complemented by a financial report to be issued by the Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office no later than 1 May 2016. Additional information is available from www.unpbf.org, and complete information on individual projects is available on the Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office Gateway (http://mptf.undp.org).
II. Global performance and lessons learned
2. The year 2015 was dominated by key reviews of the role of the United Nations in making and sustaining peace, namely, the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, the review of the United Nations peacebuilding architecture and the High-level review of the implementation of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000), which validated the Peacebuilding Fund’s role in incentivizing a system-wide, politically engaged response and in promoting coherence in crisis settings. As a central pillar within the peacebuilding architecture, the Peacebuilding Support Office welcomes the recommendations of those reviews, many of which it has already begun to implement.
3. The call by the review of the peacebuilding architecture for greater engagement between the Peacebuilding Commission and the Fund was advanced as early as June at the Commission’s annual session, during which participants issued a strong warning about the dangers of a fragmented and underresourced funding system. Those concerns were echoed during an informal meeting on Somalia — a Fund-recipient country — hosted by the Commission in November, at which participants agreed on the critical importance of predictable and coherent funding. Building upon that momentum, starting in 2016, the Fund will approach the Commission to host informal discussions on the five-year vision of newly eligible Fund-recipient countries.
4. Calls by the reviews for strengthened partnership with international financial institutions implicitly recognize the importance of coherence, not just in relation to peacebuilding initiatives, but also to the development strategies that follow. In that spirit, the Peacebuilding Support Office and the World Bank solidified their cooperation in 2015, with the Bank hosting the semi-annual meeting of the Fund’s Advisory Group in November. In addition to mapping the way forward on joint evaluations in the Central African Republic and Somalia, the meeting also highlighted progress on the thematic review of employment and peacebuilding, an initiative bringing together the Peacebuilding Support Office, the World Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). Following the meeting, the Fund and the World Bank held their first quarterly meeting to plan joint approaches to project design, monitoring and evaluation to better align their work in the future.