UNPOG organized a virtual end-of-year celebration on 23 December 2020. The virtual celebration was also attended by the Director and two staff members of DPIDG and interns. The Director commended the high professionalism, good performance and teamwork of UNPOG. A PowerPoint presentation was delivered to showcase major achievements of UNPOG during the whole year of 2020. It was highlighted that UNPOG has delivered its mandate in full alignment with that of DPIDG. Colleagues took this opportunity to celebrate the achievements, express appreciation to colleagues for the teamwork, and wish everyone a happy new year.

DPIDG/UNPOG, in collaboration with Korea Institute of Public Administration (KIPA), successfully organized the 2nd UN DESA - KIPA Forum on Public Governance and Innovative Partnerships on 8 December 2020 via Zoom.
The Forum featured 3 sessions with a total of 14 speakers from governments, academia, national public administration institutes, development cooperation agency, and international organizations such as ICLEI and UN-Habitat. The Forum provided a good venue to share lessons and exchange good practices in innovating public governance, leveraging ICTs and digital government, strengthening local governance, and forging innovative local partnerships in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
More information on the Forum is available on the UNPOG website (https://bit.ly/3q1pOwO).

Over the past several years, UNPOG has effectively enhanced the public administration capacity of developing Member States especially those countries in special situations including LDCs, LLDCs and SIDS, mostly in the Asia and Pacific Region, in designing innovative strategies and policies, advancing digital government development by effective use of ICT and frontier technology, and promoting knowledge sharing and exchange of good practices to transform public institutions for sustainable development. As UNPOG is nearing its five-year milestone since the inception of Phase II, a consultant is sought to evaluate the relevance, efficiency, impact and sustainability of the Project. The evaluation will draw among others from surveys conducted with beneficiary countries, soliciting feedback from partner agencies, and consultation with the host country to review the relevance and impact of UNPOG's activities...

Those countries in special situations such as LDCs, LLDCs and SIDS have been disproportionately hit by the COVID-19 pandemic due to weak governance, fragile health systems, backward infrastructure and lack of resilience. While coping with this still ongoing scourge and struggling to achieve a sustainable and resilient recovery, they request more capacity development support from UN agencies including UN DESA. Since early 2020, UNPOG in collaboration with many partnering agencies has been making its best efforts to support developing countries including organizing the annual regional symposium, webinars and training workshops with regard to strengthening public governance and leveraging ICT and digital government to combat the COVID-19. Yet, due to significant challenges of addressing this unabated crisis which requires a comprehensive multi-sectoral approach, UNPOG fully understands the importance of further collaboration and close synergy with all partners including academia, research institutes and other UN agencies to provide concerted capacity support to developing Member States. In this context, while preparing its work plan for 2021, UNPOG has actively networked and outreached various stakeholders including Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul National University, Korea Research Institute on Local Administration (KRILA), Korea Institute of Public Administration (KIPA), UN-HABITAT, UNDRR Office for Northeast Asia & Global Education and Training Institute, UNOSD, Asian and Pacific Training Centre for ICT for Development, ICLEI and WeGO, with an objective of enhancing UNPOG's capacities to support strengthening public administration and providing better advice and solutions for developing countries to address multitude challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.