Not to frontline staff who need to know, anyway.
The last post at COPWatch reported on how Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had recently embarked on a regime of cost-cutting. Sadly, he was only cutting the costs that he, himself, had imposed by nearly doubling the number of highly paid Directors since his election in 2017.
However, it now appears that WHO staff are not happy with the way these measures are being conducted, according to Health Policy Watch.
“This is not just about numbers – it’s about trust,” said one senior staff member. “We were promised transformation with people at the center. What we’re seeing now feels like a rollback of everything we fought for.”
Despite promising that any restructuring would be handled “with fairness, transparency, and humanity” and that WHO staff would play “an active role” in the process, representatives of the workforce are being given no access to information at all.
Without this, Health Policy Watch reports that it is “impossible for either member states or staff members to play an active role in reviewing priorities or plans.”
Yes, it is that perennial WHO problem with transparency again.
Staff have also expressed disquiet about how resources have been distributed liberally amongst the highest-paid officials, often for operating tasks which are unclear.
“When we began looking at the directors in our region, we found that two D2s had been appointed for six-month contracts without any clarity about their roles,” said one senior scientist working in a regional office.
And, while WHO foot soldiers seem oblivious to what is going on, there is a fear that cuts may not be made in the agency’s bloated higher echelons.
“It is estimated that each ADG is managing a team of 6-7 people – which together with the ADG’s own post, cost the organization an estimated $1.5 million, as a conservative figure […] consultants now make up over half of WHO’s workforce – 7,579 posts in comparison to the 9,473 staff. That is a precarious and costly staffing model in light of the administrative management requirements of consultancy contracts.”
In light of the fact that plenty of WHO funding relies on money provided from taxes, some countries may look at this confusion and wonder if they should be funding the WHO at all. Oh, wait a minute, the United States and Argentina have done that already, haven’t they?
The WHO is renowned for enabling its FCTC Secretariat to keep the public in the dark about its machinations and to bar the press and consumers from their conference discussions. It seems the richly-rewarded suits in the upper reaches of the WHO are content to treat their own staff in the same dismissive manner.
Perhaps someone could give WHO bureaucrats a dictionary so they could look up the word “transparency” one day. They’ll find it in there somewhere between totalitarianism and tyranny.