Ben Todd at 80K published an old (2014) exploratory career profile on being a program manager in international orgs “like the World Bank, World Health Organisation, International Monetary Fund and United Nations”, and notes that
We recommend this career if it is a better fit for you than our other recommended careers.
These positions may offer the opportunity to influence substantial budgets, since these organisations govern huge pools of aid money and international regulation. Typically in these organisations the average budget spent on programs per employee is on the order of US$1-10 million.1 Since it’s difficult to give workers the right incentives and the work is difficult, we think it’s likely that additional intelligent, rational and altruistic people can have a substantial impact through improving the efficiency of how these funds are spent. However, we’re highly uncertain about the expected size of the influence.
These organisations are highly influential over important global challenges, so you’ll be working with highly influential people, which increases our assessment of advocacy potential and career capital. The high prestige of these positions also contributes to our higher rating of their career capital.
On the other hand, reading Backstabbing for Beginners by Michael Soussan a few years back, detailing his experience as program coordinator for the Oil-for-Food programme, greatly soured my then cautiously net-positive view of the UN.
My friend once participated in a disaster relief in some country that was hit by tsunami. If I remember it correctly, he described the relief process as many less-known organizations actually doing something in the territory (building shelters for people who lost their homes, organizing food distribution), and a few expensive UN “coordinators” who took numbers from them and put them into their Excel sheets.
But I have no idea how much should I trust this, and how typical this is for disaster relief programs.
(One detail I remember is how important is to distribute all the foreign aid across the country, because most organizations that bring it, will simply drop the entire cargo in one port in the capital city, and consider their work done.)
Ben Todd at 80K published an old (2014) exploratory career profile on being a program manager in international orgs “like the World Bank, World Health Organisation, International Monetary Fund and United Nations”, and notes that
On the other hand, reading Backstabbing for Beginners by Michael Soussan a few years back, detailing his experience as program coordinator for the Oil-for-Food programme, greatly soured my then cautiously net-positive view of the UN.
My friend once participated in a disaster relief in some country that was hit by tsunami. If I remember it correctly, he described the relief process as many less-known organizations actually doing something in the territory (building shelters for people who lost their homes, organizing food distribution), and a few expensive UN “coordinators” who took numbers from them and put them into their Excel sheets.
But I have no idea how much should I trust this, and how typical this is for disaster relief programs.
(One detail I remember is how important is to distribute all the foreign aid across the country, because most organizations that bring it, will simply drop the entire cargo in one port in the capital city, and consider their work done.)