IAEA Technical Assistance and Co-operation Committee (TACC) Meeting
Agenda item 3: Evaluation of Technical Cooperation Activities in 2025
17 November 2025
Chair
Australia thanks the Director of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) and the OIOS staff for their report.
The objective, independent, and systematic assessments by the OIOS are vital to the Agency’s functioning, and the regular evaluation of Technical Cooperation (TC) activities conducted by OIOS is critical to the continued success of the TC Programme (TCP).
Chair
This statement will be brief and will focus on three key points contained within the OIOS report which are of particular importance to my delegation.
Firstly, we were pleased to read that regional TC projects had facilitated effective knowledge sharing among Member States and contributed to strengthening human capacity, including establishing strong formal and informal networks for future collaboration.
As an active contributor to, and participant in, the Regional Cooperative Agreement for Research, Development and Training Related to Nuclear Science and Technology for Asia and the Pacific (RCA), Australia has also observed that regional TC projects prove particularly effective in sharing knowledge and expertise amongst Member States, and provide a compounding impact to help address mutual needs and challenges.
Secondly, we note that the report found heightened risk factors around limited access to maintenance services for equipment provided by the Agency, and that high maintenance costs and the lack of local service providers pose risks to the sustainable operation of such equipment. In this regard, we emphasise a need for the TC Programme to be as sustainable and impactful as possible in the context of an increasing demand for TC projects in a resource-constrained environment, and ask that this issue be considered further by the Agency.
Our third and final point relates to gender equality and mainstreaming within the TC programme.
Chair, while we were pleased to read about the increased efforts being undertaken to consider gender mainstreaming in the TCP - both independently by national institutions, and in cooperation with the Agency - we recognise the finding by OIOS that there remains a need to further strengthen the integration of gender perspectives into the TCP. We also note that while the Secretariat had developed guidance to support Member States incorporate gender mainstreaming into their TC project design and implementation, many counterparts remain unaware of such guidance. In this regard, our delegation would see great value in the IAEA’s wider promotion and dissemination of this guidance to Member States.
With these comments, we take note of document GOV/2025/60.
Thank you.