The WHO can be improved, but not by cutting off funding to it

In response to the growing chorus, the World Health Assembly, a decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO), has mandated the global public health body to conduct an impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation of its own response to the pandemic as well as identification of “the zoonotic source” of the coronavirus.

The US has particularly taken a strong stance against WHO. President Trump has threatened to permanently end US funding to it and revoke US membership in it if it does not “commit to major substantive improvements” within the next 30 days. He has described WHO as "literally a pipe organ for China" and accused it of acting too slowly and bowing to Chinese pressure. US funding is critical to WHO -- it amounted to a fifth of WHO’s total budget of $4.4 billion for 2018-19. In its defence, WHO officials have highlighted timelines of the various warnings and statements issued by it about the pandemic.

Taking a polemical position of halting funding will hardly help reform multilateral entities such as the WHO as their ability to perform has to be seen within a particular structural reality. Even if the final report comes out with some bold recommendations for change, it will require a lot of heavy-lifting for legislative approval. There are various external as well as internal vectors that influence the working of multilateral entities and these vectors are intertwined with each other. Multilateralism, as it stands today, has many key components, namely health, political and development.

It is important to underline that all UN entities are, first and foremost, intergovernmental bodies, and the legislative processes provide the framing of its operations. Within the multilateral arena, the process of diplomatic negotiations on mandates is lengthy and time-consuming. In short, when the multilateral mandates are actually agreed upon, the lowest common denominator is usually the substantive consensus and it is quite broad to accommodate the divergent concerns of various member-states or regional blocs. Various aspects of the WHO mandate are a derivative of complex negotiations and there is hardly a room for entities like the WHO to force a member-state to comply with any advisory. During negotiations, diplomats are particularly sensitive to any provision that they anticipate could potentially infringe on their national sovereignty.

Beyond this structural reality, there is sufficient room to practically revitalise the workings of multilateral entities. An internal vector such as human resource management becomes crucial in a crisis-like situation. It may be mentioned here that there is a strong imprint of the US on the UN organisational and hiring practices. The salary structure of the UN employees is benchmarked against the salary of the highest-paying national civil service. And in this case, the federal civil service of the US has to date been taken as the highest paid national civil service. Even the organogram of many of the UN entities, particularly the UN Secretariat, are based on the US system. However, over the years, multilateral organisations are losing their edge on account of many factors, including the issues of financing and their growing dependence on voluntary contributions of the member-states.

Every member of the WHO, like other multilateral organisations, funds the organisation in two ways: assessed contributions and voluntary contributions. Assessed contributions are the dues countries pay in order to be a member of the organisation and these are assured sums. Overall, assessed funding used to account for 62% of the WHO budget in 1970-71. In 2017, it collapsed to 18%. In his 2013 book, ‘The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World’, Singapore’s former Permanent Representative to the UNHQ Kishore Mahbubani attributed the reduction to the Western countries’ desire to control the short-term agenda of the WHO. In a separate article published recently in the Strait Times, he adds that “this has implication as the WHO can recruit long-term health inspectors and scientists only from mandatory funding, not voluntary contributions that vary from year to year.”

The same reality prevails in other critical multilateral entities that have a large proportion of staff members hired through the funding pool of voluntary funding. Some are hired temporarily, with curtailed benefits. This kind of system may be suited in the private sector but is ill-suited for a multilateral system whose raison d'être is prevention of crises. This requires uninterrupted domain expertise, including regional and political nuances, and knowledge of past trends. This is difficult to substitute as these skills are accumulated over a period of time. The issuance of temporary contracts breeds inefficiency and wastage of human as well as financial resources of the member-states. The top priority for incumbent temporary staff members is to look for the next available stable contract rather than concentrating on their respective files. This proves fatal in a crisis like situation. With limited institutional knowledge, including past trends, the multilateral system is too weak to pick the warning signs at an appropriate time.

Now China, too, can compete with Western countries to fill in the bucket of voluntary funding. As the US criticism of WHO intensified, in the last two months, China has reportedly announced that it would donate $50 million in cash to WHO to support its global fight against Covid-19, in particular strengthening developing countries' health systems. China has also vigorously defended the WHO’s leadership role “in urging preparedness and a science-based and rational approach, and in helping relevant countries enhance public health capacity.”

The opacity of its political system, lack of freedom of speech and a lame civil society poses a question mark over China’s claimed response to the pandemic. However, within the structural constraints, anyone arguing for change in the working culture of the WHO should make efforts to build organisational capacity of these entities for the next crisis. This can be done by addressing specific institutional deficiencies, which is doing the possible under the given circumstances. Some of these deficiencies can be addressed by investing in these institutions, both in the context of finance and human resource, with a long-term and accommodative vision.

(The writer is a political analyst who has worked in the multilateral arena in various capacities for several years)