administrative overheads, human resourcing has been combined with other International Labour Organization projects in some country offices. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime and Interpol implement the Protection Pillar of Project Childhood. An external review of the project implementation plan in 2011 revealed that the office was struggling to deliver the project to AusAID quality standards, particularly in the areas of gender and monitoring and evaluation. This indicates that there are not sufficient resources to deliver some key areas of development work. AusAID has delivered the message that program quality will need to improve and that gender and monitoring and evaluation expertise must be engaged to ensure the program is equipped with the right systems and tools to make an impact and measure results. The United Nations Office of and Crime is also the multilateral partner that implements work under the HIV/AIDS Asia Regional Program within Burma and Lao PDR. Delays in work plan delivery and implementation on the part of United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, combined with delays due to internal government consultation and restrictions, have resulted in significant bottlenecks in implementation, underspends, and a lower than expected fund disbursement rate in Burma and Laos. The contract for work in Laos ends in July 2012 and will be extended for six months until December 2012 as we go through the transition to country support units. This will ensure that there is no disruption to harm reduction service delivery and to the peer educatory network. The contract will not be renewed beyond this period given the establishment of new Laos implementation arrangements for the program by January 2013. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime contract for work in Burma ends in December 2012 and a transition plan for HIV/AIDS Asia Regional Program services will be submitted to AusAID by end of June 2012. An independent review of the program in Burma will be completed in 2012 to assess previous implementation and inform AusAID of existing gaps to be addressed from 2013 to 2015. Management consequences – previous year The following progress has been made to address the previous year’s program management issues. An appropriate engagement between the ASEAN Committee of Permanent Representatives and senior AusAID officials has been established. The Joint Cooperation Committee met for the first time in October 2011 with a focus broadly on development cooperation between AusAID and ASEAN. This will enable the ASEAN-Australia Development Cooperation Program Phase II Joint Program Review Committee to focus on program matters. Senior AusAID officers continued to develop and foster relationships with senior officials in ASEAN and APEC through attendance at key regional senior official and ministerial meetings.
Support was provided to whole-of-government partners for development activities that address East Asia Summit priority areas relevant to their portfolio, including by broadening the ASEAN Public Sector Linkages Program to encompass East Asia Summit priorities: work was undertaken with whole-of-government partners and Indonesia to develop a new East Asia Summit initiative to coordinate responses to natural disasters across the region more effectively. East Asia Summit leaders endorsed this new joint initiative in November 2011. Various actions to assess and improve the capacity of the ASEAN-Australia Development Cooperation Program Phase II to fully expend the $57 million allocation were undertaken: progress was made towards improving the scale of activities through collaborating with international financial institutions to develop and implement joint project proposals initial steps were made towards closer cooperation between Jakarta Post and the ASEAN Secretariat. The program is due to be fully devolved to the Post by July 2012. The program director will report to the regional counsellor – an upgraded position the second annual review report was delivered in January 2012. The independent progress report is planned for April to June 2012. The full complement of staff are now employed in the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement Support Unit within the ASEAN Secretariat, and as familiarity and experience have increased confidence, AusAID staff have been able to gradually disengage from day-to-day management of the Economic Cooperation Support Program. Canberra retains strategic and financial management and continues to provide guidance where required. In addition, the decision-making and governance arrangements relating to operational matters under the mandate of the ad hoc budget review committee have been clarified. A foundation has been laid for improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of the APEC program: a review of the Asia Public Sector Linkages Program was undertaken, which included both the APEC and ASEAN/East Asia Summit Public Sector Linkages Program. It recommended merging the Pacific and Asia programs into a single secretariat and re-designing the program with an increased emphasis on monitoring and evaluation and activity design. Implementation of this work is being undertaken in 2012 multi-year projects have been approved within the APEC Public Sector Linkages Program and the APEC Support Fund that have the potential to improve project effectiveness and the sustainability of benefits a large-scale evaluation of APEC project effectiveness was approved in 2011, which will be undertaken by the APEC Secretariat in the second half of 2012 support was provided to the APEC Secretariat to progress these issues and to embed project management reforms, including project prioritisation, in APEC processes.