Check against delivery

Mr President, Madam Executive Director,

I am speaking on behalf of the European Union as a donor.

We take note of the independent evaluation of the Strategic Plan 2022-2025 and Management’s commitment to integrate its findings in the drafting of the next Strategic Plan, with a detailed set of actions proposed for each of the recommendations.

We welcome the positive results of the Strategic Plan in terms of output indicators in all Goal areas. However, we agree with the evaluators that it will be important that the next Strategic Plan is framed in a less complex and more holistic way which allows to further move away from output to outcome-level achievements, with priorities that can be more easily implemented at country level.

We very much welcome the recommendations to focus on the most discriminated-against children in each Goal area and we agree on the importance to better engage children, the youth and civil society at large in the design of programmes, in order to ensure higher accountability.

In a resource environment which is increasingly challenging, we support the evaluators’ recommendation to focus on a smaller number of costed priorities and to significantly scale up public and private sector innovative financing mechanisms, in order to broaden the funding base and secure more funding for development. We would like to hear whether UNICEF thinks it has the resources in place to make innovative financing a priority and make a significant difference in the mobilisation of resources for children in the years to come. 

We welcome UNICEF’s commitment to continue mainstreaming the humanitarian-development-peace nexus in its strategy and make it a core operating principle in the next Strategic Plan. We encourage UNICEF to keep strengthening the integration of humanitarian action into all components of the Strategic Plan and to further promote risk-informed programming.

We also strongly support UNICEF’s intention to strengthen collaboration with other partners and seek better external convergence, including with the rest of the United Nations system and through pooled resources. In this regard, we strongly support the use of digital systems for UNICEF and its partners to better monitor outcome-level results.

Despite the challenges ahead, the next Strategic Plan will be a key instrument to harness progress towards the 2030 objectives. The European Union looks forward to continuing working alongside UNICEF and make a significant difference in the lives of children.

I thank you.