Support to the National Response to contain the impact of COVID-19

The UN system in Iran has developed a Crisis Preparedness and Response Plan (CPRP) to help with a coherent and integrated response of the COVID-19 pandemic on the vulnerable populations and communities. UNDP has launched a sub-national 'Rapid Socio-Economic Response’ initiative to support micro and small enterprises – including women entrepreneurs manufacturing personal protective equipment – and catalyze effective emergency cash transfer measures. It will provide immediate income relief to vulnerable, and severely impacted households (including women headed households), technical support and seed funding for the government in the design and roll-out of COVID-19-sensitive social protection and livelihood instruments. UNDP, in addition, is also procuring PPEs for health facilities, medical labs and frontline health workers, as requested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Reflections: Learning from the past for improved decision-making & better development results

UNDP Independent Evaluation Office’s (IEO) initiative – Reflections – is a series of knowledge products offering lessons from past evaluations of UNDP work in crisis settings. Below, the first series of reflections and best practices of years of experience in crisis and emergency settings.

Lessons from evaluations: UNDP support to social protection in crisis countries

Lessons from evaluations: UNDP support to the health sector in crisis countries

Lessons from evaluations: UNDP support to livelihoods restoration and job creation in crisis countries

2020 Human Development Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic is unleashing a human development crisis. On some dimensions of human development, conditions today are equivalent to levels of deprivation last seen in the mid-1980s. But the crisis is hitting hard on all of human development’s constitutive elements: income (with the largest contraction in economic activity since the Great Depression), health (directly causing a death toll over 300,000 and indirectly leading potentially to an additional 6,000 child deaths every day from preventable causes over the next 6 months) and education (with effective out-of-school rates – meaning, accounting for the inability to access the internet – in primary education expected to drop to the levels of actual rates of the mid-1980s levels).

What we do

On the ground in about 170 countries and territories, UNDP works to eradicate poverty while protecting the planet. UNDP has had a representative office in Iran since 1966 and has – during all this time –worked closely with its major development partners to promote sustainable human development in the country.