New York Post LONDON — The World Health Organization spent nearly $192 million on travel expenses last year, with staffers sometimes breaking the agency’s own rules by traveling in business class, booking expensive last-minute tickets and traveling without the required approvals, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The abuses could spook potential donors and partners as the organization begins its week-long annual meeting Monday in Geneva, seeking increased support to fight a devastating outbreak of Ebola in Congo and other deadly diseases including polio, malaria and measles.
The nearly $192 million is down 4 percent from 2017, when the agency pledged to rein in travel abuses following an AP investigation.
But recent documents show WHO auditors found some WHO staffers were still brazenly misrepresenting the reasons for their travel to exploit loopholes in the organization’s policies and flying business class, which can be several times more expensive than economy, even though they did not meet the criteria to do so.
The agency’s inability to curb its expenses could undermine its credibility and make it more difficult to raise money to fight health crises, according to Sophie Harman, a global health professor at Queen Mary University in London. She said the problem wasn’t so much the amount that WHO was spending on travel, but how it was being used.
“WHO needs to get its own house in order to legitimately go to the international community saying, ‘We need more money for Ebola,’” she said.
Among other responsibilities, WHO is the UN agency charged with setting global health guidelines and coordinating the response to health emergencies around the world. Its approximately $2 billion annual budget is mainly drawn from the taxpayer-funded contributions from member countries. The US is WHO’s biggest contributor.
