This month's blog post will provide guidance on the contingency budget lines and the new HFU’s access to the OneGMS, and will end with a reminder of the existence of your HFU checklist.   

Contingency budget lines 

The following guidance is intended for Partners with contingency budget lines. For full information, please see the CBPF Global Guidelines. 

1. The partner should communicate with the HFU regarding the new and unforeseen needs to be addressed and the intended use of the contingency budget line. Review and approval, when appropriate, will be completed within 24 hours of the request. This email should be uploaded in the ‘Documents’ tab of the project proposal. 

2. The actual use of the contingency budget line shall be described in the subsequent narrative and financial reports. If the contingency budget line is not utilized, or only partially utilized, within the project implementation period, the remaining amount shall be refunded at the time of final financial reporting and audit as per standard procedures. 

3. The project shall be undergoing a revision on the OneGMS to reflect the activities, people targeted, and a detailed budget breakdown in relevant budget categories. A GAA is needed if the use or re-deployment of the contingency budget line affects any budget category more than 20 per cent. This revision can coincide with other revisions of the project (i.e., it does not have to be a standalone revision just for tracking of the contingency budget line). 

4. It is recommended that indicators and activities added with the deployment of the contingency budget line are prefixed by 'contingency' for easy tracking. 

5. Revision is required without a GAA if by using a contingency budget line, the partner wants to add new budget lines. As the use of contingency budget is solely for new emergencies the partner may want to add new budget lines. 

In the system, no reporting can happen without the revision opening the space in the project in the different tabs for the indicators to be reported on. The flexibility on the contingency budget would hence in practice be related to use of the budget without requiring PRIOR revision in the OneGMS but more of a post factum one. 
 

HFU Access to the OneGMS 

The OneGMS Admin Team will be handling access requests to the OneGMS from HFUs from now on. To be eligible, the HFU will first need to follow a programmatic training with their programme officer in New York and then another training with the Geneva HQ team on the functionalities of the OneGMS.  
Once an HFU has successfully completed these training and wants to gain access to the OneGMS, another member of the fund can contact us at gms-support@un.org to grant them access. 

HFU Checklist

Throughout the year, HFUs must make sure that the fund is up to date on the OneGMS in terms of contacts, risk management, evaluation etc. For that purpose, we created an HFU checklist to make sure your fund is correctly set up. This is a quick reminder of this checklist, originally released in our December 2022 blog post.