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Asia Pacific has become a global hub of trade and innovation, achieving significant gains in health and poverty reduction
Sixty years of UNDP exercising core for human development
March 24, 2025
Sixty years ago, the Asia-Pacific region presented a starkly different reality. Widespread poverty, governance challenges, limited access to energy and economic isolation defined much of the landscape. Today, the region has evolved into a global hub of trade and innovation, marked by historic strides in reducing poverty, pioneering green and blue technologies, and achieving significant health gains. The 2024 Regional Human Development Report detailed the years of extraordinary transformation that advanced overall human development (HD) progress.
UNDP marks its 60th anniversary, the occasion provides an opportunity to reflect on its genesis and the founding mandate to advance and accompany developing country progress - not sector by sector, but to reduce human poverty and deprivation and advance the human development condition for all. For UNDP to support this effort, it took core strength in foundational muscle built-up over the last six decades.
UNDP was established in 1965. Its central mandate to reduce human poverty and deprivation was funded by voluntary core contributions, provided by countries that saw in it global public interest, to advance common interests and to ensure a world without poverty, injustice and inequality, following decades of colonial rule and lopsided development.
UNDP was established in 1965 to reduce human poverty and deprivation.
Photo: UN/Marvin Bolotsky
Embracing human development as expanding opportunities and choices, UNDP moved from a development approach driven by growing infrastructure to growing capabilities and freedoms to unlock human potential. While infrastructure remains critical for economic growth and the extension of services, more attention to individual, institutional and societal capabilities was the rallying cry to move from low to high human development through the 1990s and 2000s. As evidence surfaced on elements that had a significant impact on the HD trajectory of countries, the organization embraced the obvious - the quality of governance, equality for women and the ability to wisely manage the environment.
This journey has not been a straight line, as development never is. However, it is marked by some remarkable milestones that are often forgotten in the haste to respond to the present. The establishment of India’s first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur in the 1960s, initiated in collaboration with UNDP, laid the institutional foundations for science education and tech innovation that continues to shape that country’s economic trajectory.
India's Kanpur City.
Photo: Shutterstock
Nepal and Bhutan’s first scheduled, commercial flights were launched with UNDP’s support in the 1960s and 80s, opening trade and tourism by connecting these countries to the world and to its remote regions. In the Maldives, a first motorboat named “Sulha” delivered critical supplies to reach isolated atolls in the 1970s, bridging geography that once seemed insurmountable. Across the Pacific Islands, UNDP helped small island states in formulating their first development plans, enhancing the capacities of their young civil service and introducing computers and linking them to the internet. Singapore and South Korea transitioned from recipients of UNDP aid to high income donor countries. These efforts and results are woven deep into the fabric of everyday life in the region, and serve as enduring reminders of how symbiotic, trusted partnerships between nations and multilateral institutions can catalyze profound change.
Asia Pacific has become a global hub of trade and innovation, achieving signifilcant gains in health and poverty reduction.
Photo: Shutterstock
Paro International Airport in Bhutan.
Photo: Shutterstock
In a region characterized by complexity – be it from recurring natural disasters, economic up and downswings or geopolitical uncertainty – UNDP has continued to work alongside national institutions and local communities to address development challenges that threaten people’s well-being and safety. These range from the erosion of skills with massive brain drain and unjust curtailments on women’s incomes and freedoms, to devastating floods and tsunamis that wipe out lives and livelihoods, and a growing contamination from pollution and waste. Indonesia’s sovereign green and blue bonds, supported by UNDP, have raised billions for sustainable development, and through the Climate Promise initiative, UNDP supported 25 countries in the region to enhance their climate ambitions and accelerate the implementation of climate actions in line with the Paris Agreement. While ideas and shared knowledge, basic infrastructure and service extensions, technical assistance and capacity development have all been a part of the offer, the single common factor that has made a difference, irrespective of context, has been the steady trusted in-country presence of UNDP.
In a region characterized by complexity UNDP has continued to work alongside national institutions and local communities to address development challenges.
Photo: UNDP/AIS Forum
This presence has been made possible, in large part, by partners who invested core resources in UNDP, complementing the critical funding programme countries contributed to the costs of offices in their countries. Flexible and reliable, it is ‘the core’ that enables multilateral institutions like UNDP to stay-in-place across changing situations and respond swiftly to crises. Over the years, these core resources have allowed UNDP to strengthen governance systems, build local resilience, and skill and empower those who take their economies and societies forward, even in the face of pandemics and wars. When the world watched Afghanistan undergo rapid and turbulent change in 2021 and women were increasingly left out of public life and income opportunities, UNDP initiated immediate support to women entrepreneurs – 80,000 are engaged to date, generating over 450,000 jobs and creating income for over one million people. Today these businesses have become one of the few options for women’s economic participation with agency, across Afghanistan. In Myanmar, with an ongoing civil war on multiple fronts since 2021, UNDP’s resilience-building initiatives in rural and urban communities affected by the conflict have reached 3.5 million people, focusing on rebuilding homes, getting small farms working, supporting skills and basic services, and providing a continuity of markets and income to allow people in distress to still make key choices to manage their lives.
Businesses have become one of the few options for women’s economic participation with agency, across Afghanistan.
Photo: UNDP Afghanistan
So, UNDP’s 60th year is a time of celebration of achievements and consideration of future pathways. Comparing the institution to the human body, if non-core resources (those earmarked to a specific programme or initiative) are akin to strong cardio needed to go the distance with the necessary speed, strengthening the core is what builds institutional muscle, stamina and strength. A strong core structure for the human body is what keeps the bone and muscle frame aligned and allows the body to develop steadily, improve balance, move with agility and adapt to the movements required as it evolves. A strong core provides the foundation with which to withstand short-term pain and absorb longer-term risk. Institutional bodies often act and react as human bodies do.
In this period of giant leaps in tech and innovation, in managing multipolar risks and complexity, expanding people’s dignities and choices requires renewed dedication. Exercising, aligning and strengthening the core base remains foundational to face the human development challenges ahead. The work is far from over, and the next chapter of UNDP’s story in Asia and the Pacific is waiting to be written—together with the partners, leaders and communities that make progress possible.
Photo: UNDP Pakistan
