Where Did the Money Go? Inside the UN’s Misuse of Member State Funding for Victims of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

This week, I expose how Member States were told their contributions had funded “successful” projects for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse, while the UN’s own auditors found those very projects had failed completely.

In striking contrast to the Secretary-General’s triumphant account of successfully implemented projects for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse, the United Nations’ internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) depicts a system mired in mismanagement, absent oversight, and outcomes so hollow they verge on tragic irony.

Five projects costing over $815,000 were meant to help 628 survivors of sexual exploitation and abuse in the Central African Republic rebuild their lives. Instead, they reflected a pattern of institutional negligence disguised as implementation success.

Victims were trained in agriculture without access to land, in hairdressing without a hair dryer, and in pastry-making without ovens.

The so-called “income-generating activities” generated no income; only frustration. OIOS field visits to Alindao and Bambari found women who had dutifully completed their vocational courses yet could neither farm nor open a salon. Those trained in agriculture discovered only after graduation that they had no access to land whatsoever -no plots, no communal fields, no arrangements for leasing or use. The implementing office, astonishingly, had never verified whether participants owned or could access land before investing funds into agricultural training. In effect, they were trained for an activity that was structurally impossible.

Equally, those trained in hairdressing received “start-up kits” that omitted the most essential tools: no hair dryers, no scissors, no power supply solutions. OIOS noted that no market analysis or feasibility review had been conducted; the Mission never examined whether these trades were viable in the targeted areas or how victims might sustain them. The projects were conceived in spreadsheets, not in communities.

Projects were launched in locations chosen by “professional judgment”, meaning, effectively, at random. Communities with the largest number of victims, such as Dekoa and Sibut (which accounted for 21 per cent of all recorded victims), were simply left out.

The implementing partner, hand-picked without any comparative advantage analysis had no office, no staff, and no demonstrated capacity in the Central African Republic. There was no review committee, no competition, and no oversight. Trainers were recruited ad-hoc, curricula were missing for two of five courses, and attendance didn’t matter: beneficiaries who stopped attending still received completion certificates and start-up kits.

The project steering committee that should have provided governance was never established. Eleven of thirty-six weekly progress reports simply stated “Nothing to report” while projects were floundering. Even the Trust Fund team in DMSPC and the Senior Victims’ Rights Officer issued recommendations that went unheeded. The Mission failed to monitor progress, delayed disbursements, and excluded even basic provisions like transportation and food for trainees travelling several kilometres to training sites.

The result? A programme ostensibly designed to restore dignity to victims became a showcase of institutional negligence: vocational training without vocation, empowerment without power, assistance without assistance.

And yet, a triumph, according to the Secretary-General. While the OIOS audit revealed governance failure and zero impact, the Secretary-General (SG) presented an entirely different picture to the General Assembly.

In his report A/79/789 dated 17 February 2025, titled Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and abuse, the Secretary-General cited these same projects as a model of success. He proudly reported that since 2016, $5.1 million from 25 Member States had funded 21 projects, including those in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and South Sudan, with “medical care, psychological support and vocational training” provided to victims. He then called on Member States to move away from voluntary contributions and establish a “predictable and sustainable funding model.”

The Trust Fund in Support of Victims of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, established in 2016, was created to bridge service gaps by providing vital support to complainants, victims, and children born as a result of sexual exploitation and abuse. The Fund’s governance is chaired by DMSPC, under USG Catherine Pollard, which also serves as the Implementing Office.

Its 2024 Annual Report echoed the Secretary-General’s optimism, claiming the “successful implementation and launch of 21 projects“, and emphasizing that “substantial resources are urgently needed to sustain support to victims”.

Its principal contributors listed in their own reports were:

• United Kingdom – $1,117,000
• United States – $620,000
• Italy – $581,000
• Norway – $393,000
• Canada – $240,000
• Japan – $200,000
• Australia – $153,000
• Bangladesh – $148,000
• Germany – $120,000
• India – $100,000
• Nigeria – $100,000
• Switzerland – $92,000
  Total: $5,188,000

Nice figures. Glossy charts. Positive reporting. 

The 2024 Annual Report reads like a success story, one slight problem, though: none of it was true.

The internal OIOS audit tells the opposite story: that the projects touted as successful in both the SG’s report and the Trust Fund’s annual report failed completely. The OIOS Report 2025/035, covering 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2025, detailed systemic failures:

• No oversight or governance: No project steering committee was established to supervise implementation or review progress.
• Arbitrary project locations: Sites were selected without predefined criteria, excluding major affected communities.
• Copy-paste approach: The implementing partner simply replicated a vocational model used in another Mission, without any local context.
• No due diligence: The partner was selected without comparative advantage analysis, and had no operational base in the country.
• Missing curricula and unqualified trainers: For two of five courses, there were no curricula; the trainers’ qualifications were undocumented.
• Certificates without competence: Beneficiaries who dropped out still received start-up kits and certificates.
• Inflated costs and logistical chaos: Two of five MOUs omitted key delivery details, forcing MINUSCA to pay an additional $14,000 in transport.
• Zero monitoring: Out of thirty-six progress reports, eleven contained no information while projects were ongoing.
• Ignored recommendations: Repeated calls by oversight officers to fix basic deficiencies went unanswered.

The result, in OIOS’s own words, was that the projects “did not adequately meet the needs of victims” and failed to achieve any sustainable outcome. The contrast could not be starker:

• OIOS found systemic failure, absence of oversight, and no measurable impact.
• The Trust Fund celebrated completion and called for more funding. 
• The Secretary-General reported success, progress, and implementation.

So which version of the truth did the Fifth Committee receive?

At stake is not only the credibility of the Trust Fund, financed by Member States such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway, Canada, Japan, and others, but also the integrity of the United Nations reporting system itself.

How can the Secretary-General speak of successful victim-assistance projects when his own internal audit reports describe them as failed, mismanaged, and without impact?

While the Secretary-General urges Member States to establish a sustainable funding model for the Trust Fund, the very projects financed by it could not sustain a single beneficiary.

The victims trained to bake without ovens and farm without land are not merely metaphors for bureaucratic incompetence, they are living proof of an accountability system that exists only on paper. Who will then tell the Member States that the UN’s own victims are still waiting for assistance and that the only thing the Organization managed to generate was another report?

A while ago, my colleague Lucas Mendos criticized the commentators who called UN reports “useless,” pointing out how people often confuse low download numbers with low relevance. He rightly noted that most UN reports are technical in nature, written for specialized audiences, and should never be judged by clicks.

But that argument assumes one thing: that the right people actually read them.

So why aren’t Member States reading these reports?

How is it that in the same United Nations, the Secretary-General can deliver a glowing account of success while his own internal oversight body is documenting complete failure?

How can he stand before the General Assembly and ask for a more “sustainable model of funding” when the very projects he cites have collapsed under his watch?

And what are the Member States and ACABQ delegates doing about it? Why are they even paid if they cannot monitor how their own assessed contributions are spent, or whether the projects they fund are implemented as reported?

And what about the victims of sexual exploitation and abuse: the women and children the Organization vowed to protect and whose dignity it promised to restore?

What kind of dignity is this, when their names appear in reports as “beneficiaries” of projects that never worked, that left them exactly where they began?

The Trust Fund was created to support the victims of exploitation. Instead, it exposes a system that exploits even their suffering to sustain its own image.

And to the Fifth Committee delegates: read the reports. No one else will.

NB: a copy of this article will be sent to the Permanent Missions to the United Nations of each Member State listed among the contributors to the Trust Fund — so they may see how their funding was used, and what their reports did not say.