Bahrain and four other regional countries are expected to create joint human development projects, officials announced.

Gender equality, economic diversification, environment protection and public administration and governance may be possible areas for collaboration, since the United Nations identified them as the most in need of improvement.

The projects will be implemented with the help of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia and UAE will also strengthen their partnership with the UNDP in setting up future strategies.

In addition, the UNDP will look at how it can adjust its system to enable these countries to benefit further from the activities of the UN.

'There has been very good project work with governments but there are opportunities for more work to be done,' UNDP Evaluation Office director Saraswathi Menon said at a press conference held at the UN House in Manama.

'These countries have not benefited fully from the UN system. Therefore, they should get the opportunity to benefit from all the UN has to offer.

'If we want stronger strategies and to work with net contributor countries (NCCs) then our own system has to change in order to be a better partner,' she added.

The move comes at the end of a two-day Stakeholder Workshop on the Evaluation of role of the UNDP in the NCCs of the Arab region, which concluded here.

UNDP NCCs are a special group of countries that are eligible to participate in UNDP but because they have higher levels of income, they are affected by special policies that limit the resources provided by the UNDP to their programmes.

As a result, the UNDP's activities are largely financed by host governments.
The NCCs in the Arab region are Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia and UAE.

The independent evaluation, conducted last year, looked at UNDP's Role in the NCCs of the Arab region over the last 10 years.

The key objective of the evaluation was to assess the UNDP's activities in the region in terms of addressing NCCs' developmental challenges and supporting their aspirations.

The workshop discussed the findings, conclusions and recommendations of the draft evaluation report.

The meeting concluded with a set of recommendations.

'We agreed these countries can play a big role in the international community,' said UNDP RBAS deputy assistant administrator and deputy regional director Abdoulaye Mar Dieye.

'All participants said they should get together so that when they go to the UN conference they can speak as NCCs.'

Dieye said the UNDP would follow up the implementation of the report at the national and regional level.

'We discussed a report which is a synthesis of five national reports, each report will be discussed in each country,' he said.

UN resident co-ordinator and UNDP resident representative Sayed Aqa and other UN officials were also present.-TradeArabia News service