28 . MOPAN 2017-18 ASSESSMENTS . UNITED NATIONS RELIEF AND WORKS AGENCY FOR PALESTINE REFUGEES IN THE NEAR EAST UNRWA has ongoing initiatives, supported by other UN partners, to support the safety and security of its staff. It has long been recognised that female UNRWA staff are confronted with specific safety and security risks during their work. To respond to this challenge, UNRWA embarked on a joint Training of Trainers with the UN Department of Safety and Security and the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to explore specific security risks and needs of women. UNRWA also rolled out its own gender-sensitive training to train UNRWA (and partner) staff. KPI 4: Organisational systems are cost- and value-conscious and enable financial transparency and accountability. This KPI examines how UNRWA uses its external and internal control mechanisms to meet the standards it sets on financial management and transparency. UNRWA has been transparent in its needs-based approach to planning and budgeting amid rising refugee needs and operating costs and significant funding shortfalls. To be able to continue service delivery, UNRWA has instituted agency-wide austerity measures and fully utilises all available funding. For example, the Agency has clear costings for delivery of a quality education service, and thereby the areas where different investments in improvement initiatives can lead to marginal gains in quality. However, UNRWA currently lacks the financial resources to go further than this, as a very high proportion of resources is spent on staff salaries. Projects are increasingly used in the service area as opportunities to develop new approaches, but in ways that are conscious of longer-term sustainability implications. However, not all projects are designed based on a cost-recovery model, which would contribute to sustainability. In education, projects are used to strengthen systems, sometimes through the piloting of new approaches. UNRWA, understandably given the context, is preoccupied with short-term funding priorities. Thus, much of its staff’s time and attention are directed to resource management and mobilisation – potentially at the expense of their fully “doing the work”. UNRWA’s ability to execute programming as planned is hampered by the unpredictability of revenue sources. The considerable variability of UNRWA’s revenue in the current MTS period is having a significant impact. Although UNRWA maintains tight cash flow management and has clear data on expenditure by field of operations and by programme, the Agency has been required to continually adjust its spending according to the oscillation of funds available. Efficiencies in programming have been pursued and achieved, for example by moving from food distribution to cash transfers in some fields of operations and through the use of the information management of the e-education and e-health systems. However, these efficiencies have had some negative impacts on UNRWA services, such as increased class sizes, and there are some concerns over the wider effects, at household and societal level, of moving at this point in time from food distribution to cash transfers in certain field contexts. UNRWA has data systems that support potential moves to results-based budgeting. UNRWA introduced and now runs an enterprise resource planning approach using SAP software. This provides good data on the costs of operations and on where cost savings have been achieved. However, this approach – as yet – does not separate out costs by output. In some areas of education and health, specific exercises have tracked cost data against outputs as a basis to compare the costs of delivering services internally versus using external service providers. In the Gaza Strip, the sustained practice of gathering and interpreting data now allows UNRWA to forecast with confidence the implication of a change in delivery standard that is driven by resource allocation in terms of effect on a progress indicator. UNRWA has consistently met audit standards. UNRWA is audited by the UN Board of Auditors (UNBOA). Within UNRWA, the Department of Finance within the Executive Office has designated responsibility for addressing any gaps or weaknesses identified by external audits and for tracking, following up on and quality-checking the implementation