A Country-Led Cooperation Approach to Development | The Futures Summit

Why It Matters

UNOPS’s model demonstrates how transparent, cost‑recovery services can accelerate development in fragile states while preserving donor confidence, making it a template for broader UN reform and more effective global aid delivery.

Key Takeaways

• UNOPS implements projects in fragile contexts using fee‑for‑service model.
• Demand‑driven, country‑led approach reduces risk for donor governments.
• Local procurement accounts for over half of UNOPS spending, boosting economies.
• Fee‑for‑service model enforces cost‑recovery, enhancing transparency and trust.
• Integrating policy financing with core contributions needed for UN reform.

Summary

The CSIS Futures Summit featured a conversation between Noam Anger and George Morira Dilva, executive director of UNOPS, about a new era of development cooperation built around a country‑led, demand‑driven approach. UNOPS positions itself as the UN’s operational arm, delivering infrastructure, procurement and project‑management services in some of the world’s most fragile and conflict‑affected settings, from Myanmar to Gaza, while charging only a cost‑recovery fee.

Key insights include the agency’s fee‑for‑service financial model, which forces frugality and transparency because UNOPS must break even each year. Dilva highlighted the mismatch between growing, diversified financial flows—philanthropy, blended finance, impact investing—and the limited governance structures that oversee them. He argued that bringing all actors to a single table and separating core policy funding from project‑level fees would improve accountability and efficiency across the UN system.

Concrete examples illustrate the model’s impact: UNOPS monitors all commercial cargo to Yemen, manages the 2720 mechanism for Gaza, and oversees a university construction in Brazil, all while sourcing more than 50 % of procurement locally. Their research with Oxford University shows that 92 % of the Sustainable Development Goals depend on infrastructure, and that procurement represents 15‑20 % of a country’s GDP, underscoring the strategic leverage of responsible purchasing.

The implications are clear: scaling UNOPS’s fee‑for‑service, country‑led framework could enhance delivery speed, reduce donor risk, and stimulate local economies, but it requires a parallel commitment to core financing for norm‑setting agencies. Reforming the UN’s financial architecture to align funding streams with governance mechanisms could unlock greater solidarity and efficiency at a time when billions still lack basic services.

Original Description

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is a UN entity that specializes in infrastructure, procurement, and project management services, supporting governments, UN agencies, and development partners in implementing projects across complex and high-risk environments. Unlike many UN entities that focus on policy or normative frameworks, UNOPS operates as a delivery-focused platform, managing billions of dollars in projects annually across sectors including climate resilience, energy, health, and infrastructure. Its model emphasizes efficiency, transparency, and operational flexibility, positioning it as a key implementing partner in contexts where traditional development delivery mechanisms may be too slow or fragmented.

Under Executive Director Jorge Moreira da Silva, UNOPS has positioned itself at the center of broader UN reform efforts, including the UN80 agenda, that seek to make sustainable development cooperation more efficient, accountable, and results-driven in an increasingly constrained fiscal environment. At the center of this shift is a move away from measuring success by financial inputs or project outputs and toward measuring it by tangible impact on the ground. This reflects a growing recognition across the UN system that the challenge is not simply about mobilizing more financing, but about ensuring that existing resources are better aligned with actual country needs. With a $4 trillion global funding gap for the Sustainable Development Goals, financing often fails to reach the most fragile and underserved contexts. Through its demand-driven model in which governments define their own priorities and contract UNOPS for implementation, UNOPS is helping advance a more country-led approach to development, one that aims to strengthen both the quality of delivery and the real-world effectiveness of development spending. This discussion draws on UNOPS's experience to explore what more effective, country-led development cooperation can look like in practice, and how the broader development system can close the gap between available resources and real-world needs.

The CSIS Futures Summit is made possible through generous support from Chevron Inc. (Founding sponsor), ADM, Cisco, and the Embassy of Denmark in Washington D.C.

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