[yk]

And is the WHO primarily an aid agency, where very high travel costs would be a problem, or is it primarily a coordination body, where high travel costs would be the point? The article is just missing this piece of information how is the WHO supposed to work. (Next exercise for journalists, supposed according to the people who founded it, not supposed according to the guy who writes about it.)

More concretely, if the primary mission is getting high level officials into one room to talk about malaria, AIDS, etc. then travel expenses is precisely what the WHO is designed to do. If the WHO is designed to ship medication to third world countries, then it may be, that the WHO is doing it wrong. However travel into third world countries is expensive, you need to rent a car, hire translators, get equipment that can keep vaccines cool during transport, etc. It may be that these expenses are billed as travel expenses and only the actual vaccine is billed as cost of malaria. In that case the travel expenses should raise an eyebrow, but is still only some indication that something may either be wrong or the accounting is not optimal for PR purposes.

Actually that is a argument I notice too often, X should work like this and they're doing it wrong, according to the author, and when one looks into the matter a little bit, then it turns out that the organization in question has very good reasons to not work like this.

[brudgers]

Another expense in areas with ongoing humanitarian crises or less stable government institutions is security. It tends to be expensive.