Future of UN Internships at risk in the face of a $400 million budget gap
Despite its good intentions, the United Nations is facing a serious budgetary crisis. In February, the Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance distributed a memo to UN leadership concerning “Managing the liquidity crisis of the 2025 regular budget.” outlining the need to lower $400 million in spending through December. The memo cited a letter from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in which he suggested curbs on travel, trimming utility spending, and hiring fewer consultants.
Concurrently, the General Assembly committee that deals with UN budget matters is being pressured to submit an agenda to realize global commitments like the 2030 Agenda and the Pact for the Future. At the same time, member states are diverting their own national agendas and moving away from global commitments in the face of rising geopolitical uncertainty and instability.
A major item that was on the budget committee agenda for the previous session was General Assembly Resolution 77/278 from 2023 to revitalize the UN’s internship program. The resolution seeks to enhance the diversity, value, and sustainable future of the UN workforce. Member states must now determine, in the context of a post-Pact for the Future, whether to reduce long-term investments in light of the UN’s overall budget crisis, repeating the same trends seen in progress (or absence of it) toward the Sustainable Development Goals, or genuinely reconsider investing in a well-designed UN secretariat internship program to alleviate strain on the UN system.
In the last decade, 21,943 interns have participated in the United Nations Secretariat, averaging about 2,200 annually. These internships have provided an essential bridge to cultivating geographic and interdisciplinary diversity in the UN’s junior talent pool. Besides, a systematic internship programme is necessary for states to implement further efforts in upholding their promises in serious youth engagement, as established by the UN75 Political Declaration and the Pact for the Future.
The existing informal nature of UN internships, primarily unpaid save for a few agencies such as the UN Development Program and UNICEF, results in mixed quality and inefficiencies in the system. Due to the lack of standardized onboarding, completion, career development, and visa support guidance, interns face significantly different experiences and benefits working at the UN.
An autonomous worldwide coalition, named the Fair Internship Initiative, created a UN Internship Program Quality Index to assess the strengths and weaknesses of UN secretariat internship programs. It surveyed more than 600 interns throughout the system in 2024, concluding that the World Intellectual Property Organization had the highest perception of internship quality, while the Secretariat was rated the lowest.
Paid internships consistently receive higher scores not only for the equal opportunity they offer but also because they typically have more structure and development goals, and effectively utilize interns’ skills across teams. The ad hoc character of internship schemes not only creates uneven experiences but also creates a piecemeal response, with each UN organization investing its time and effort to define substantive youth participation, development priorities, and optimal practices, resulting in huge duplication and wasted efforts.
Resolution 77/278 recognized these gaps and mandated the Secretary-General to conduct a full assessment of the UN secretariat internship program prior to the commencement of the 79th session for the year 2024-25. The outcomes, “Review of the United Nations Secretariat Internship Programme,” indicate that both interns and managers favor a structured program with improved methods of learning and that paid internships, particularly in New York, played a vital role in the number of interns from diverse fields and nationalities.
In addition to evaluating the status of internship programs, the Secretary-General’s report proposed a plan for a reorganized, revitalized internship program by, among other actions, aiming for youth involvement as outlined in the Pact for the Future. These actions are intended to establish a competitive, simplified, and streamlined process to recruit interns from a broader geographical range. These suggestions were reviewed by the General Assembly last week, and while receiving clear backing from EU and ASEAN nations, a resolution has yet to be reached.
As such, three key requests from the secretary-general to the General Assembly remain under consideration: a proposal to reorganize the internship program to enhance its value and sustainability through structured learning, technological training, and financial assistance to enable broader geographic outreach; remove the limitation of a “break in service,” which prevents interns from securing or applying to positions in the “Professional” and “Field Service” categories for six months following their internship; and approve the principle of a centrally funded and managed financial assistance plan.
Cumulatively, these results would significantly support the maintenance of high-quality young staff within the UN workforce, which becomes all the more crucial to the sustainability of the UN workforce as senior-level jobs get “retired out” of the system. For the UN and its 193 member states, the Pact for the Future presents a long-term vision that can be drawn upon to balance the present budget crisis while investing in youth. That strategy lies at the core of sustaining generational confidence in multilateralism.
