About UNDP

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the UN's global development network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, expertise, and resources to help people build a better life. We are on the ground in 177 countries, working with them on their own solutions to global and national development challenges.

UNDP's main goal is to help countries build their own local capacity to achieve sustainable human development - to improve people's lives on an enduring basis - their work, their education, their health, their surroundings and their use of natural resources.

At the United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders put development at the heart of the global agenda by adopting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which set clear targets for reducing poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women by 2015. UNDP's network links and coordinates global and national efforts to reach these Goals. Our focus is helping countries build and share solutions to the challenges of:

UNDP helps developing countries attract and use aid effectively. In all our activities, we encourage the protection of human rights and the empowerement of women.

The annual Human Development Report, commissioned by UNDP, focuses the global debate on key development issues, providing new measurement tools, innovative analysis and often controversial policy proposals. The global Report's analytical framework and inclusive approach carry over into regional, national and local Human Development Reports, also supported by UNDP.

In each country office, the UNDP Resident Representative normally also serves as the Resident Coordinator of development activities for the United Nations system as a whole. Through such coordination, UNDP seeks to ensure the most effective use of UN and international aid resources. 

"Much hard work and many challenges lie ahead. But I am confident that working together, and alongside others in the UN family and other stakeholders, we can make a difference for the better and meet our common development goals. The poorest and most vulnerable people in our world deserve nothing less."

Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator