A Singaporean's UNDP Story
What happens when you take someone from Singapore’s private tech sector and put them in charge of technology for one of the UN’s biggest development organizations? You get cloud computing in disaster zones, facial recognition for police in Guatemala, and SMS voting guides for 120 million Pakistanis.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 40 is written by Shirin Hamid, who became the Chief Technology Officer and Director of Information Systems and Technology at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2005. She’s a Singaporean who went from consulting at Deloitte and Accenture to running tech at Keppel Corporation, and then made the jump to the UN. Her story is about using technology not just to keep an organization running, but to actually change lives in some of the poorest and most conflict-ridden places in the world.
What UNDP Actually Does
Before getting into Shirin’s story, it helps to understand what UNDP is. It’s one of the largest field-based UN entities. It operates in more than 170 countries. Its mission is reducing poverty worldwide.
The numbers tell part of the story. In 2013 alone, UNDP programs supported the creation of 6.5 million jobs (over half for women) in 109 countries. It broadened access to justice in 117 countries. It helped build resilience in 14 crisis-affected regions. From the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to the first democratic elections in Tunisia in 2011, from Hurricane Haiyan in the Philippines to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, UNDP was on the ground.
Singapore and UNDP Go Way Back
The relationship between Singapore and UNDP has deep roots. When Singapore became independent, UNDP was a central partner in economic planning. According to Craig Murphy’s book on UNDP, Singapore received the highest per capita UNDP support of any country at that time. And the government used it well, focusing on education, industrial development, and urban planning.
In 2012, Singapore and UNDP jointly set up a Global Centre for Public Service Excellence in Singapore. The Centre focuses on policy research and sharing knowledge about public service across countries. So the partnership is still going strong decades later.
From Singapore’s Private Sector to the UN
Shirin grew up in Singapore. Diverse society. Universal education. Meritocracy regardless of gender, race, or religion. After years in management consulting and leading tech teams (including in the male-dominated maritime industry), she joined UNDP in 2005.
Her appointment was notable. A relatively young professional from the private sector. A woman from the global South. At director level. She sees it as a reflection of what a Singapore upbringing brings: professionalism, values, and a particular way of thinking about leadership and innovation.
Tech in the Hardest Places
The job took Shirin to places far from Singapore’s glass towers. Bangladesh with its rapidly growing cities. Sudan and South Sudan in constant crisis. Gaza and the West Bank. Niger, one of the poorest nations on earth. Guatemala with its civil unrest. Sierra Leone, devastated by Ebola and an 11-year civil war.
Seeing that kind of hardship firsthand changes your perspective on what technology is for. It’s not about the latest gadgets. It’s about whether a farmer in Bangladesh can get crop information on a mobile phone. Whether police in Guatemala can access records from their cars. Whether voters in Pakistan can find their polling locations through a text message.
Real Results From Smart Tech Choices
Some of the concrete results Shirin’s team delivered are impressive.
In Guatemala, they set up sophisticated geo-spatial systems for citizen security. They also deployed mobile police stations (basically laptops in police cars) and facial recognition software for law enforcement.
In Pakistan, SMS texting let 120 million voters find their voting locations.
In Somalia and Eritrea, they brought in solar power solutions. In Afghanistan, they set up video conferencing for the government.
In Bangladesh and Macedonia, mobile systems helped farmers access information they needed.
When the Arab Spring hit Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Syria, UNDP offices kept running because their data was safely stored in the cloud. Same thing when flash floods struck Bangladesh and the Solomon Islands. Having information in the cloud meant that local disasters didn’t destroy the data needed for recovery.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, they replaced bulky and unsafe data centers with solar power and lean infrastructure kits. The DRC office also introduced mobile money, an atlas for renewable energies, and video conferencing that reduced the need for travel across a massive country.
Cleaning Up the Back Office
It wasn’t all field work. Shirin also led a major internal overhaul. UNDP had hundreds of separate transactional systems scattered across its offices. Her team consolidated all of them into a single global Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. This was one of the largest UN inter-agency Oracle/PeopleSoft implementations. It simplified processes, increased resilience, and made it easier to adopt international accounting standards.
The results showed. In 2014, the Publish What You Fund Aid Transparency Index ranked UNDP first in the world out of 68 major agencies for transparency. First. Out of 68. That’s not a participation trophy.
Shirin’s team also won security and technology awards three years running: an IDG CSO50 Award for 2015, an Information Security CS040 Award in 2014, and an Information Security Computer World Good Award in 2013. Shirin herself received the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders 2014 Award.
Lean, Green, and 177 Offices
Part of Shirin’s program was rethinking what IT looks like across 177 offices worldwide. The goal was reducing the technology footprint through lean and green initiatives while actually improving what the tech could deliver.
This is harder than it sounds. These 177 offices are spread across countries with wildly different infrastructure, connectivity, and stability. Getting them all on the same systems, with the same security standards, while keeping costs down and being environmentally responsible is a serious engineering challenge.
The results went beyond just keeping UNDP running smoothly. Helen Clark, UNDP’s Administrator, noted that the technology program had direct impact on development results. That included supporting the Ebola outbreak response in West Africa, creating mobile libraries in Egypt, and building gaming solutions for youth unemployment in Bhutan.
Gender and Leadership
Shirin also touches on something personal. While UNDP had strong female leaders at the top, including Administrator Helen Clark and Associate Administrator Gina Casar, the organization still had a long way to go on gender parity in leadership overall. The same issue it was trying to solve in the countries it served.
She describes visiting a poverty reduction project in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where women from the margins of society were stepping up to lead community development committees on health, education, environment, and employment. Seeing that made her proud that her own story as a woman from Singapore leading technology at a global organization could be part of that larger promise.
About the Author
Shirin Hamid is the Chief Technology Officer and Director of the Office of Information Systems and Technology at UNDP, appointed in November 2005. Before UNDP, she ran technology units at Keppel Corporation and Keppel Offshore and Marine in Singapore. Before that, she consulted at Deloitte’s Boston office and at both Deloitte and Accenture in Singapore. She holds a Masters of Business Systems Analysis and Design from City University, London, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. She attended National Junior College and Methodist Girls School in Singapore, and was selected to represent Singapore in Operation Raleigh’s Kenya expedition.
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