“ =.. .

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WILLIAMS

By Sheila Barry Tacon

New York

September 30,1996

John Williams candidly reviews UNICEF’s Information and Communication work beginning in thelate 1970’s. With perspicacity and wry humor, he describes the roles and contributions of individualswho helped make UNICEF synonymous with child survival in the Jim Grant era. Changes in

approaches, new publications, work with National Committees, management issues that were notresolved are amply covered. John served in several high level positions including Director ofInformation and Public Affairs, and Secretary of the UNICEF Executive Board. The genesis of the

State of the World Children’s report, the organization of the World Summit for Children, how themanagement study came to be are among the highlights of this engaging recollection.

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Table of Contents

Subject

Early YearsFamily and schoolingYoung journalistEarly UN experience

Page

4-5

UNDP 5-6Founding of Non-Govermnental Liaison Service (NGLS)Initation to join UNICEF Information Division

Role of Information in the Labouisse Era 6-8Approach and capacityEmphases; prioritiesQuality of staffBeginnings ofprogramme communicationErskine Childers

Harbingers of ChangeBeginnings of the State of the World’s Children ReportTeam of Jim Grant and Peter AdamsonJim Grant as a communicatorCommunication network

Contribution of Tarzie VittachiCapacity to verbalize

Seeing programme as communicationNot a managerPolitical instincts

New publicationsFacts for LifeProgfess of NationsAdamson teamReactions in New York

Snbject

●SOWCR and GOBI

8-10

10-11

11-12

Page

12-13

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Other issues of note 13-16Family planningPrimary educationWomen and girl’s education

International Year of the ChildGrant’s view of his inheritance

Development EducationConceptsMissed opportunitiesWork of National Committees

16-17

17-18

Management issues 18-21Demise of early system that linked needs of field and HQPerception of prograrnmeStaffing of country and regional officesViews on structure

@ Relations with National CommitteesLack of management systemNew York and Geneva at odds

Summation of decadeUNICEF’s role in communicationExecutive Director as driving force

Interlinkage in the fieldStaffing levels in the fieldUCI stresses

Development as a processUNICEF’s strengths and weaknesses

UNICEF Executive BoardAppointment as Secretary

21-22

22-23

23-25

25-26

26-28

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Subject Page

Principal functions of post 26-28Role as “honest broker”Executive Director’s relations with Executive BoardManagement study

World Summit for Children 28-29Organization of liaison with UN missionsVignettes

Division of Information and Public Affairs (DIPA) 29-31Creation of DIPABreak up in 1989Revitalization of Information

Executive Office 31-33Political skills

o Gifted individuals in UNICEF 33-34

Personal recollections

Convention on the Rights of the Child 34-37Importance of advocacyPrioritization

Empowerment 37-38

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1.

SBT: Perhaps, it is best to begin with some background John about your early years, those whoinfluenced you, and what ultimately led you to becoming a journalist.

JW: Well, my father was a journalist. This is the short answer as to how I got into it. My father

T\wO

came from an Irish Australian family, a very broken, disturbed family in which his father andhis two older brothers had both vanished, almost literally. They hadn’t died, they’d just goneand I have no serious idea why. He was let? from the age of about 14 or 15 to care for hismother and his sister. So he had the responsibility for the two women in his family most ofhis life from the time he was a teenager. He was an extremely successfid newspaperman aswell as journalist and he went into management, working for many years as one of the seniordeputies for Keith Murdoch who was Rupert Murdoch’s father in the Melbourne Heraldnetwork of Australian newspapers. Eventually, he succeeded the elder Murdoch though notimmediately - there were other transition figures in between as the Chairman of theMelbourne Herald Group. So he was arguably the most influential newspaper person inAustralia for a number of years. He was an extremely gified and ditlcult man, an alcoholicin his later years, who had enormous swings of mood from elation to depression like manypeople, when alcohol is present in large quantities,

My education more or less coincided with the outbreak of the Pacific war, which wasunfortunate for me, in that I was sent initially to boarding school, from the age of 6, run byCatholic Christian Brothers, most of whom were Irish. Most shouldn’t have been in anyposition of responsibility over anyone. Eventually, after the war, I went to a Jesuit school,which was much better, the Jesuits, of course, being educated and very caretislly selectedmen.

I went into jomnalism partly because of my father’s ability to open doors for me and partlybecause, in a very contrary way that young people otlen have, I was fed up with beingdependent upon my father, dependent on my daily keepers as it were, and because of hisverbal abuse. So I moved out of his direct day-to-day responsibility but in my firstjournalism job, I was still obviously very much within his magnetic field.

I got into the UN - I’d always been interested in the work that the UN did. In the late 1950swhen I lived in Paris, I worked very closely with UNESCO. My first wife, in fact, workedbriefly for UNESCO. Later, while living in Cambridge, I’d been working for FAO, writingfor them, and had undertaken some writing missions in India on sheep development projectswhich were being started by Australians. They were interesting projects and the articles werevery well used. George Ivan Smith, the renowned Australian who was Hammerskjold’s righthand man or along with Urqnhart one of the people closest to Hammerskjold, was then theDirector of UN Information Center in London. He and I got on well. He saw these articlesand passed them along to UNDP. That is how I came to join UNDP where I was asked to setup their Media Desk in New York. This was in 1970, I came here to New York and

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discovered, to my great astonishment, (no one else shared this astonishment) that all theinformation capacity that UNDP had was in New York. They didn’t have anybody anywhereeke in the world in information work. I’d been working for many years in Europe beforejoining the UN and had worked with the Manchester Guardian in Singapore covering SouthEast Asia, and for the Scripps Howard network in the United States. At the time that I joinedUNDP, I was working as a free-lance writer for a number of publications based inCambridge. I had a lot of experience working in Eastern Errrope in the 1960s and WesternEurope as well, I had covered the 1958 crisis in France that brought De Gaulle to power andthe 1968 crisis that brought him down, I was very much aware of, interested in, and attractedby the European media scene and I just couldn’t believe that UNDP didn’t have anyone

anywhere else but in New York. I began pointing this out, I’m sure to such an irritatingextent, that they finally moved me to Geneva where I opened the first Information and NGOOffice, with Jurgen Milwertz who worked for the UN. It was called the NGLS, the Non-Governmental Liaison Service. Later, there was a New York office for the service.

2. SBT: You founded NGLS John?

2. JW: NGLS had a 20th or 25th Anniverawy celebration a couple of years ago. There was probably

●no one around who had even remembered that I had anything to do with it. I worked aboutsix years building up UNDP’S information role in Europe. UNDP at this point was fundingthe agencies in their development work and that meant it a lot of work with all of theSpecialized Agencies and also with UNICEF. I got to know UNICEF people well and in1975, Jack Ling asked me to join UNICEF as Deputy Director of Information in New York.Atler a lot of soul searching I did - I was not particularly anxious to leave Europe and I neverliked living in New York, even though I have been here so long. So, I came and I served aathe Deputy Director of what was initially the Information Division and then became theDivision of Communications and Information tlom 1976 to 1980.

Well, the role of information changed enormously, of course, in the two decades I wasconnected with it. Perhaps it would be best ilhsstrated by a little story. When I first joinedthe Information Division in the Alcoa Building in 1976, there was one staff member whosejob was to go through all the clippings that were received. She had to highlight in yellowevery mention of the word UNICEF. The quality of the information work was assessed onthe number of times UNICEF’s name was mentioned in the article. It didn’t matter muchwhat the article said as long, of course, as it wasn’t negative, Nevertheless, in broad terms,UNICEF Information was better than that of other agencies in the system but it wasessentially more directly propagandistic than informational. Obviously bureaucracies haveto follow certain paths. In those days there were a number of films that were produced whichtalked about UNICEF’s great contribution in the developing world’s progress, and bookletsand brochures, and UNICEF =, which was a very successful newsletter at the time, andtwo or three other newsletters as well. There was not any serious attempt to assess theimpact of all of this. It somehow had a sort of self justifying existence which didn’t requirefimther analysis.

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3. SBT: The clipping service?

3. JW: The clipping service, yes, exactly. It’s changed incredibly since that time, of course. We’llbe going to that in a while but at that stage, it was already firstly better staffed than any otherUN Agency. I don’t mean the number of posts because FAO, for example, and UNESCOwould both have had far more professional posts at their command. But the quality of thepeople who were in the organization, people like Jack Ling himself who had been in

UNICEF Information work for many years and was very experienced at it. People withstrong professional backgrounds like Dan Brooks, who later went on to become RegionalDirector for UNICEF, like Don AlIan, who was and still is one of the most elegant writersI know, and Jacques Danois, who was one of the best film people that I’ve worked with, andJoan Bel Geddes who was in charge of publications. There were a number of very highlyqualified people and it was already starting to move away from the propaganda approach thatI was talking about earlier. That more or less occupied me as far as late 1980 when I movedto Geneva again and was in charge of External Relations and Information in the UNICEFoffice under Aida Gindy as the Director. But just to come back to Information withinUNICEF at that time, apart from the Information work which we’ve already discussed, wewere starting to see the beginnings of an effective social mobilization outreach within

UNICEF. For this, I think credit must firstly be given to Erskine Childers, who later wenton to become the leader of this field and then the Director of Information in UNDP. ErskineChilders brought the vision of what was required to bring communication into communitiesthat were effected by development, to try to smooth the way for effective and positive socialdevelopment that people wanted but which otkrr could be prevented by bad handling by localofficials or by lack of understanding by certain influential segments of the population. I don’tknow if anybody was working in this field before Erskine, but if they were they certainlyweren’t influential within the UN system. Erskine was in my view clearly the father of thismovement and it went well beyond UNICEF, it was carried forward I think with great effectand power by Colin Fraser within Food and Agricultural organization for many years. ColinFraser is now working as a consultant living in Latin America. He, I think, would be in manyways the most effective single person following on immediately atler Erskine Childers.Within UNICEF, although I think that personally there was no bond of any strong kind at allbetween Dick Heyvmrd and Erskine Childers, Dick Heyward understood, in broad terms, theimportance of this work and pushed it hard and that made Jack Ling’s job easier because healso believed in this. So that by the time I joined UNICEF in 1976, there was already acommunications unit established. It wasn’t very well established. It wasn’t very well staffed,but it was there.

4. SBT: The idea

● 4.JW: W“lthm a couple of years - two or three years - it was staffed by Revy Tuluhungwa who isnow UNICEF’s Representative in Ethiopia. Revy took it upon himself, with a small staff,to go around from country to country pushing communication in the programme sense - in

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what was, at that time, a very hostile environment. Most UNICEF Remesentatives didn’twant to hear about it. It was getting in the way of prograrnme work which, in those days, wasthe delivery of supplies and, to some extent, perhaps, the training of trainers, teachers orhealth workers. But for many people, it was the delivery of physical, tangible goods. Revyworked very hard at this and made a tremendous contribution to it. This then was thesituation when Jim Grant came in as Executive Director in the early 1980s. There was aninformation capacity which was strong but still rather narrowly focussed with some fieldrepresentation, some regional information officers, and in some cases, country informationofficers but rather restrictive, and a whole communications network that was starting todevelop, although it too was rather narrow in its focus. What they were trying to do, as I saidbefore, was influence communities in rural areas or slums to change their attitudes or for theleaders of certain influential groups to change their attitudes to allow development tocontinue. Afier Jim Grant came into office, that was to change considerably, much to thebetter.

One of the harbingers of good change in the information area, and for that matter in thebroader communication area as well as it turned out, was the role of Peter Adarnson. HereI have to go back a little bit. When I was working for UNDP in Geneva in the 1970s - musthave been 1974 or 1975- Erskine Childers who was by then the Director of Information forUNDP in New York, called me and said, ‘Tmsending to Geneva from Oxford Peter Adarnsonwho is working with the New Internationalist and he’s got some ideas about an informationaction package for UNDP. I don’t know how they had first got together, but Peter and I metvery soon after this call and started a professional and personal close relationship which hasexisted ever since. I went several times to Oxford. Peter came several times to Geneva andwe developed this package for UNDP which had a statement by the Administrator and goodgraphics and it was a big success, particularly with NGOS, which were its main target. SoPeter was already starting to think by late 78, 77, 78 of producing a series of State of tbe=. He wanted to have, looking back now, of course, hopelessly optimistic but we didn’tknow that then, he wanted to have one on the state of the world’s health, on the state of theworld’s environment, the state of the world’s agriculture ....

5. SBT: But that was conceivable.5. JW: Well, it was, but not all done by Peter. Peter and his wife Leslie, who has always worked

very closely with him, came to New York. I remember they came up to the sixth floor of theAlcoa building and they and I satin Jack Ling’s office - Jack had gone somewhere else - andtalked about how this could be done. In fact the state of the world’s environment and thestate of the world’s population were published and I think they had initially some success butthen neither of them had anything like the effect of the State of the World’s Children.Anyway, we thought - I guess more specifically, I persuaded Harry Labouisse that we neededto have one for UNICEF and we decided to produce the first State of the World’s Children’s

I@??I for ~CEF. That must have been in 1978. peter had already had some othercontacts with UNICEF apart from mine. Richard Pordes, who now works for GCO wasinstrumental in bringing about some of those contacts. But my relationship with Peter went

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back, as I said, a number of years by this point. Anyway, we went ahead. The biggestdifficulty we faced with producing something on the state of the world’s children in thosedays, as we discovered, was in getting any accurate information on Eastern Europe becauseall of the child related statistics in Eastern Europe reflected ideal situations. They were 100per cent in everything and, of course, the United States, France and Sweden were not. Theywere, as we all knew at the time, were well abead of the Eastern Europeans and the figuresdidn’t show it! We had a lot of trouble with this. At the same time Labouisse was gettingnervous about having something called the State of the World’s Children, because, as he said,I’m not responsible for the world’s children. I’m responsible for the children of thedeveloping world.’

6. SBT: “ I can hardly tackle that.”

6. JW: Which struck us as being a bit odd but he insisted and in the end we called this publication,which should have been called the State of the World’s Children, the Situation of Childrenin the Developing World, perhaps not quite as catchy a title but it was done. Peter did it; itwas produced and it was very successfirl at the time. That was the genesis of the State of theWorld’s Children Report, which later on, more than any other single element in UNICEF’sInformation Policy, I think far beyond any other single element, was responsible for theenormous influence that UNICEF had in setting the social development agenda through the1980s and into the 1990s.

7. SBT: What a contrast between the approach of Harry Labouisse and that of Jim Grant

7. JW: Well, Jim, of course, was a big picture man, to put it mildly,

8. JW: I was in Geneva at the time that Jim and Peter first got started together. They worked verywell together, very closely together. Peter is a writer of extraordinary power and clarity andwas already very experienced in social development issues, and became more so as the yearswent by. He and Jim worked extremely well together, a very effwtive partnership which sawthe State of the World’s Children’s Report grow from one ship to a whole flotilla of differentvessels carrying television and radio messages and all kinds of launches and languageadditions and summaries and special versions done by National Committees and by fieldoffices. It just grew and grew and grew. Many other areas in information grew veryeffectively in this time but this one was, by far, the single most effective in my view. At thesame time, on the communications side, while Jim saw the advantages of what was beingdone so far, and we discussed this he and I once, and he understood that he was able to moverapidly because the base had already been laid before he got there, he saw his role incommunication in developing countries essentially as one where he persuaded the presidentand the prime ministers and the kings and senior people to concentrate more on theirchildren, on their women, their youth, even on certain specific aspects of health. And he wasspeetaculaxly successfid in getting them involved. He did not, in my view, pay nearly enoughattention to the next level down. There was no way that he, Jim, could have been involved

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in working with people at the second and third tiers. That should have been the job of hisrepresentatives and I think, to a considerable extent, that work was not done as effective] y.Sometimes the opportunities that Jim Grant had were not always followed up. Nevertheless,

it was an extraordinary performance in developing the whole of that communication network.

At the same time, we saw the growth of the communication officers, networks within thecountry offices and within the regions, and the information officers’ network within UNICEF.Other areas that I should have mentioned, in relation to the growth of information work,

included working with television particularly. There was much less producing our ownmaterial and more work with major international and national television networks to getthem to adopt our themes and to cover progmrnrnes either with which we were associated orwhich followed the programmatic lines that we were pushing. Then a very major move wasmade into electronic media - we no longer had those yellow highlight markers! - which manyyears later, round about the late 1980s, was followed by a move into animation which wasvery successful,

9. SBT: Where did Tarzie fit into all of this?

●9. JW: Well, Tarzie came into this more or less at the breakpoint between the Labouisse and Grant

regimes. He didn’t come in, as you know, immediately after Jim took over but very soonatler. I think that Tarzie’s contribution to this was that he was the first very senior UNICEFofficial who came out of this area. Up to this point, the ASGS in UNICEF had all beenprogmrnme people. Tarzie was coming out of, pretty well, a pure media background. Hehad worked in UNFPA but he was not a pro~amme man in the development sense at all.I think Tarzie’s contribution was too add, in people’s thinking, a reinforcement of this broad

dimension that they were starting to move into. Tarzie had the capacity to verbalize - towrite too - but particularly, I would say, to verbalize either opening the door on acommunication mobilization area that the discussion had completely ignored so that peoplesuddenly realized that they were talking at a very minor level and there was a much greater

opportunity that theyhadn’t seen. Tarzie was often good at mocking someone who wasconceited and was pushing, as a lot of UNICEF programune people at this stage did and somestill do, although less now than past, of course, pushing something that was, in their view,programme and substantive and therefore, the really important thing and overlooking the factthat the delivery of the blackboards and the textbooks and the chalk and the pens is - youneed all these things - but you don’t measure the success of an education programme bycounting up the volume of these and saying, “We’ve met our targets in achieving educationin Zimbabwe.” You do it by ensuring all the way down the line from the President down tothe school child that people are aware of what is at stake, that the teachers are properlytrained, that children are coming to school with some food in their stomachs, that theirparents understand the value of the education, particularly the education of girls, that theyunderstand the importance of primary education, particularly as opposed to ofren in Africaand Latin America, at this point at least, and probably still now, the over-emphasis, andcertainly overspending as a proportion of tertiary education. All of these, just taking the

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example of education, are essentially communications tasks and with his very powerfuleloquence, both written and spoken and his capacity to cut through layer upon layer of thicketto get to the heart of the matter. He was not always right, of course.

10. SBT: But he loved doing it.

10. JW: He loved doing it, yes. He sometimes did it for the sake of doing it rather than the objectiveitself but I think by Tarzie’s presence there - there was an indication that Jim gave this areaa huge importance - he was reinforcing Jim and the others in what needed to be done. Iwould say that his role there was very critical. It was not one that was concerned withmanagement. Tarzie was not a manager and were he sitting here at the table with us todaySheila, he would be nodding his head in agreement, I’m sure.

11. SBT: I’m sure.

11. JW: Well, certainly if anyone could write, they should be doing that rather than doing anymanaging, but he made a major contribution in this area, no question about that, He’s, infact, the only one, even up to now, who has brought this kind of background to the ExecutiveOffIce in UNICEF, never before or ever since has there been this kind of mind. I think withKarl-Eric Knutsson, Richard Jolly, Maggie Catley-Carlson, with Jim himself, Tarzie oftenhad a very salutary effect of brirrging them down to earth on basic communications issues.The Deputy Executive Directors who came after him came from different backgrounds.

There was no way that they could have contributed what he did in this area.

12. JW: But there were other very important publications which were developed during this period,Facts for Life being one of them, which earned a developmental message right down tofamily level in I don’t know how many languages, 50 or 60 at the very least, maybe more.

12. SBT: Whose idea was that?

12. JW: Peter Adamson’s The State of the World’s, Children ReDort, Facts for Life and The Progressof Nations were all Peter Adamson’s ideas. The Progress of Nations, I am not sure at thispoint whether it is going to survive or not, was, of course, of much shorter duration, but alsobrought very important dimensions into this area by comparing the industrial countries withthe developing countries and showing that in many ways in different situations, thedeveloping countries were ahead of the so-called industrial countries and getting away fromthe old United Nations belief /insistence that you couldn’t actually name a country, if therewas something wong, you couldn’t say that it was Chad or China or Chile. It had to be thatcertain countries remairml unnamed and, in some cases, you could work out which they werebut the governments didn’t get upset then. Under Jim Grant UNICEF moved into an areawhere it was willing to upset governments to some extent. It was done with a certain amountof political skill but..

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13. SBT: I caught some flak on that but I actually enjoyed it.

13, JW: Tarzie was also alone among these people, except maybe for Maggie Catley Carlson,whohad what I would describe as a real street tighter’s political instinct of what would fly andwhat wouldn’t. Jim didn’t have that. Jim succeeded, at least in the short run, but sometimesby ignoring political realities and just moving forward through them, I think it sometimesworked against him in the longer run.

14. SBT: Yes.

14. JW: Which I had never seen done before. I found it a spectacular and sometimes distressingseries of maneuvers

15. JW : But Tarzie understood the structure of power and was oflen able to bring that kind ofknowledge to bear whereas I don’t think most of the others in the Executive Office really had

anY political skills. AS you say, Jim and maybe Mike Shower understood Washington butbeyond Washington there was very little. Tarzie had, as very few people in UNICEF had,a basic political instinct which I think journalists who have worked in political situations indifferent regions over a long period of time sometimes have, It is something you developover a period of time and he had that.

16. JW. Yes, Peter was the progenitor of these three major publications which have been the threekey publications of UNICEF during this 15, 17 year period. Not only did he think them upbut he carried them forward. He developed a very close relationship with Jim - too close insome ways in that often a number of people who often thought they should have more of arole were cut out. In the early years of the State of the World’s Children, what they did wasprobably necessary. I doubt if the Report would ever have gotten off the gound if theyhadn’t done that but it did leave most people - I’m not speaking from a personal viewpointbecause I was not excluded - but nearly everybody was excluded ffom this process and a lotof people were resentful. I think we’ve seen in recent years that the pendulum was swungback in the other direction and now there are large numbers of people participating. Whileclearly that is a good thing in some ways, in the production of crisp, sharply directed prose,that is not the way I would go about it. I think prose is best written by one or two peoplewith a clear idea of what they are going to do and without other people leaning over theirshoulders suggesting, hey, well, you should have mentioned so-and-so because she’ll beoffended if you don’t put her in. I mean that’s not the way it’s done.

17. SBT: On the marketing of all this, John... Peter produced these beautifidly finished products buthe was also involved in getting the message out.

● 17. JW: He was involved in the writing of the material - I think Peter is the best development w-herI’d ever met- and Leslie, his wife, was involved in the production of it. They were installedin Oxford. Most UNICEF people that they were dealing with were installed in New York.

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I think that a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of tension grew up over the years, with peoplein New York feeling that those in Oxford had it easy. They are not going to all thesemeetings, they are not taking all this flak. I think Peter and Leslie underestimated the de~eeof difficulty that people in New York, people who were trapped withn the bureaucracy, weregenuinely facing. But on the whole, this was the most spectacular effective partnership withInformation work I think I have seen anywhere.

End of Side 1

18. JW: One of the points I wanted to mention here was the State of the World’s Children Reportand GOBI. Some time in 1981 or 1982 when Jim was still casting around for his precisemission in UNICEF, he had a weekend meeting in Manhattan with a number of people fromoutside UNICEF and from within the organization and came up with the concept of GOBIwhich was growth monitoring, oral dehydration, breastfeeding, and immunization. of whichimmunization came to be the dominant element although some of the others remain veryimportant. I remember on the Monday after the Sunday the meeting ended, Peter Adamsonhad finished the next years. State of the World’s Children Report, which, of course, was noton GOBI because Jim had only just decided on it the day before. The three of us met in myoffice in the Alcoa Building on the ground floor and Peter and I argued with Jim that heshould not scrap the report and start all over again, not because the report was already writtenalthough that was not an unimportant point, but because he didn’t, we thought, have the timeto carry the organization with him on GOBI just putting it straight into the report. He neededto spend some time in bringing his staff and particularly, his staff in the country and regionaloffices on board. We satin my office, the three of us, with no one else interrupting for hoursarguing this out late one afternoon, Peter and I on one side and Jim on the other. I’d neverargued anything as fiercely and perhaps, never as well either, as I argued this. Peter is anextremely good debater and at the end of the two hours, Jim stood up and said, ‘OK, you’veconvinced me. I’ll leave it for another year.’ And then the next morning he came in and said‘We’re to redo the State of the World’s Children on GOBI, and so we did. And GOBI wasthen accelerated in its imposition on UNICEF. I always felt and I think Peter feels the same- that it was a mistake because a lot of country offices and a lot of regional offices didn’tunderstand what Jim was on about and it took him a long time to recover from that. But thewhole of this operation was essential y one that once we were over this hurdle, of course,Peter and Jim would work together. The only issue on which they had extreme divergencewas on the importance to be given to family planning or contraception. In those days,UNICEF didn’t like to talk about contraception because it might offend the Vatican orCatholics; certain National Committees were very concerned about the issue. It led to somemonumental clashes, most notably, at one stage, between our colleagues in Latin Americaand our colleagues in South Asia who occupied diametrically different positions on the issue.I think, on the whole, this issue was handled badly. While we are on the subject, I think

UNICEF’s handling in all of its information work of the importance of primary education andparticularly, the education of girls was poor.

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PAUSE

19. JW: OK, Sheila, picking up again, I think we were talking about the themes within the contextof the State of the World’s Children Report. And I believe I was about to take off on one ofmy favorite subjects, which is that the State of the World’s Children Report concentrated fora very large extent on health issues and to a very minimal extent on education issues. Wehave already dealt with the question of contraception and how that had been, much to PeterAdamson’s unhappiness, underemphasized in the Report over a number of years leading

UNICEF, I think, to adopt a very peculiw and essentially untenable profile on this issue and...

19. SBT: But UNJCEF had always held that point of view.

19. JW: Yes, but I think that under Jim Grant the point of view became a much more politicallyexpedient one. And also, I think we need to remember that in comparing say the early 1960sor the early 1970s with the mid 1980s, the issue had become globally one of far greatersignificance and the concern about population pressure and environmental problems wasmuch, much greater. The knowledge of how unplanned pregnancies lead to maternalmortality and essentially to poverty was much more widespread. I think the fact thatUNFPA, for example, had grown enormously during that period of a couple of decades wasproof of the emphasis many people and many governments were willing to give to the issue.But UNICEF essentially didn’t change its position, I think much to its discredit.

But we were about to talk about primary education. Here I believe UNICEF also failed. I’mtalking still within the context of its information trust but, of course, that is also relevant toits progms-nrnatic one but this conversation is essentially about its information andcommunication staff. I think that UNICEF neglected the issue of primary education becauseJim wanted to concentrate on those issues that he felt were, as he would have put it, doableor more immediately doable. I’ve heard him argue this case very cogently if you are in aroom with a number of closed doors and you want to get out quickly then, obviously, thedoors that you try to push or force open first are those which are the least resistant and there’sno doubt that primary education is a much more complicated subject. You need normallyfor immunization, for example, not more than three or four interactions with the child butwhereas to achieve minimal literacy, according to UNESCO’s criteria, you need to have atleast four years of primary education so you’re not looking at three or four interventions orinterfaces with the child but maybe 800/ 900. You are also looking at a number of otherrelated factors such as teacher training and good nutrition which is much more importantthan training even the nurses on levels of prior nutrition in the child so that the child is awareof what is going on in the classroom which is not essential as far as immunization isconcerned. Obviously, it is desirable, but it is not as essential.

@ 20. SBT:Whywasheinsuchahurry?

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20. JW: I think Jim was looking for the magic bullet on education. And there isn’t one. I think hegew frustrated and im~ated with ~is education staff. I’m not sure that he was alwaysequipped with the best people in this area but it wasn’t their fault that they just didn’t comeup with anything that you could package and deliver quickly and effective y. Nobody everhas. It’s a long hard slog and a lot of development is tied up around it. Once you get thatright you are essentially getting everything right. I think that the ignoring of this issue wasa failing. So much for the issues around the State of the World’s Children.

21. SBT: But you left out women.

21. JW: Well, I let? out, in my last comments, girls’ education because I think that within educationit is clear, and it was clear then too, that the importance of girls’ education was primary, notthat boys’ education wasn’t as well, but if one wanted to bring about social change at thefamily level then educating the girl is absolutely essential. In most countries then and stillnow, this is considered to be a secondary matter. On issues around women, there was acertain amount of awareness in the different State of the Worlds Children Reports about therole of women but UNICEF, at least under the Labouisse and Grant regimes, never clarifiedits position about women. hr a certain way, one can certainly see the dilemma because hadUNICEF become heavily involved in women’s improvement issues, I think it would havebeen a somewhat different agency. God knows it was badly enough needed. But I thinkthere was a certain amount of fright that taking on this major area would detract them finmchildren and then, of course, you stti on the roundabout - at what point is a woman a womanand at what point is a woman a mother. The whole thing is quite ridiculous but this is thelevel on which the argument was conducted and I think one might have very fairly fault thewhole UN system with not having taken up the question of the importance of improving theoverall situation of women within societies rather than just off load it all on UNICEF.Anyway, UNICEF never, it’s true, addressed this issue carefully. But I would argue thatUNICEF missed its responsibility primarily in relation to girls and there is no question there,there’s no possible evasion of that failing.

22. SBT: hr the same vein, John, a lot of things did happen as a result of the Year of the Child interms of new issues affecting children being brought to UNICEF’s attention. There was akind of underlying criticism, you know, that having concentrated and tried so hard to be adevelopment agency UNICEF had somehow forgotten its subjects and was looking atprogramming in a different way and trying to link with government plans, missing its ownconstituency. hr all of those early discussions on the Report and possible areas of emphasis,did that ever come up? Was Jim sufficiently aware of what he had actually inherited?

22. JW: I believe that Jim thought he’d inherited a dog’s breakfast. Of course, he didn’t use thosewords but he said to me once: ‘You know when I came in here, you wonldn’t believe it.’ I

ecould understand what he was talking about. He said we had these tiny little pro~ammesall over the place. There were hundreds of them. What Jim wanted to do (and if you for amoment lay aside the criticism that I’ve made of the major issues that were not addressed)

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what he in many ways spectaculady achieved was a concentration on a number of key issues

7 which in a communication sense and in a progmrmne sense he was able to raise to a level ofvisibility and urgency and concern, which was light years ahead of anything that hadhappened before he came along and he believed that it was worth not taking on the otherissues. In other words, not trying to open more difficult doors to achieve rapid success inthese areas. It’s a point and I share it up to a certain level. He really felt that at the time hecame in that what UNICEF had constructed was quite nice but it wasn’t going anywhereparticular. Jim believed, of course, and was absolutely right in believing this, that unlessUNICEF successfully hijacked the resources and the attention and the priorities of others -of govemrnents, of non-governmental organizations and other groups of all descriptions -then it would fail in its mission. He liked very much the phrase that Razia Ismail onceprovided him with, “a handful of people with a handful of money”. That was what UNICEFwas and still, in a sense, is and unless UNICEF is able to get its major themes and prioritiesand emphases accepted by much larger elements and much more powerful elements of thecommunity than UNICEF itself then it is not going to go anywhere. That’s where he thoughtit was and I think to a large extent he was right.

23. SBT: And that is how he got the governments to support him.

. 23.JW: Yes,yes

23. JW: Yes and that was a communications push, of course.

24. JW: I think one area where UNICEF has done poorly in communication, as I think it’s doneextremely well in these other areas that we’ve talked about - in the broad socialcommunication in developing countries and in its information policies and its activities - Ithink it is in what is now called education for development that UNICEF has not done well.That is largely because there was never enough push from senior level to clari& what it was

that was meant by these words and what the opportunities for UNICEF were. Education fordevelopment or development education if you look back over the years through the 80s andthe 70s in UNICEF you will find myriad definitions of what this term means and they’vecovered a very wide spectrum of activities. I think for many people almost everything that’sdone in communications that isn’t directly concerned with media has been some kind ofeducation for development. But what was originally meant by development education wasa system whereby children essentially in the industrial countries, although that was debated,but essentially in industrial countries, were provided within their education systems with anunderstanding, a non-paternalistic, non-patronizing understanding of the complexity of theproblems that face the developing world and how in many ways these problems are similarin the industrial world except that the level of resources with which to combat the problemsis so much less in the developing world and therefore, the problem remains much moreunresolved and complex and difficult.

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I believe that in the countries where this is being done - it’s not just a case of me believing

z it - I think it’s tme that many studies have shown it, countries where this kind of interventionin education systems with children between the ages of about 9 and 13 has paid offenormously within a few years in adult understanding of tolerance for and desire to changewhat otherwise seemed to be completely incomprehensible situations in the developingworld. I think the main reason that there was never enough push from the top was becauseit didn’t offer a quick fix. It always seemed to be that the rewards were going to be pushedoff somewhere into middle distance but if one figures that interventions, say with an 11 yearold, that person will be voting in another 7 years and it is not such a long term postponement.When one looks at the enormous success of countries like the Netherlands and Sweden in

their understanding of development issues compared to United States or Australia or anumber of other affluent countries, one can see the enormous difference that really aconcerted push would have made. But it was never made tlom the top because of this reasonand therefore, it was handled in a very messy way. As you and I both know, we had for anumber of years development education officers in Geneva and New York who haddiametrically different views as to how the whole thing should be done and they appearedto spend a great deal of their time trying to thwart each other from doing very much. Thatmay be unkind but that was certainly the perception and to some extent the reality - that nota hell of a lot got done. What it required was key interventions in curricula and with teachertraining and that would have had to be done at the national level and would have requireda considerable effort within UNICEF to develop their capacity to work at national level. Itwas never even tried. I’m not talking about the work now being done in UNICEF by NoraGodwin, I’m not familiar with Nora’s work. I think she’s a geat lady but I don’t know whather actual programme is and that’s not meant to be in any way pejorative. I just don’t know.But certainly before her time, it was amateurish. There was never anybody who had aserious background in curriculum development involved.

25. SBT: And yet the committees were really eager and actually did a geat deal of work indevelopment education.

25.JW: Yes, they did,

25. JW: Of course their understanding of what was meant was also varied from country to country.There were some which were very effective, like Denmark, in intervening within the

curnctda of their own countries. I’m sure that with the right push that could have happenedand UNICEF could have done it particularly as it would, atler a time, go into coalitions withnational NGOS, not just with the national committees but with other NGOS and withMinistries of Education and teacher training associations and so on. It could have been anenormous input but it was never done.

● 26. JW:~dliketotalkabitaboutmanagementissuesasfarasinfomationmdcommunicationisconcerned because in this area, at least in the Jim Grant period, (I think it probably appliedto some extent also, in the Labouisse period) the approach to organization was almost

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surrealistic. Let’s look firstly at relationships between New York and country and regionaloffices, When I first joined UNICEF in the mid 1970s, there was a system in place. It wasn’tperfect but there was a system in place whereby regional information otlcers were expectedand most of them did spend about half their time producing materials that answered therequirements of New York and Geneva as far as media were concerned, as far as publicationswere concerned and so on. That essentially no longer exists. It was destroyed by a systemunder which the people in charge of information and communication in New York hadalmost no authority in the selection of information and communication staff. They had noauthority at all in their performance assessment and very little in their subsequent transfersor ending of service or promotions. All of these came to be the responsibility of therepresentative so that the staff depended on the representative almost entirely.

27. SBT: How did that happen?

27. JW: It happened in the period UNICEF is far from now when progmrnme people consideredthemselves, and they were considered by most other people including the Executive OffIce,the substantive part of UNICEF, which meant I think that information and communicationand fundraising and I suppose ~eeting cards and maybe personnel and other matters wereby definition excluded, as it were, excluded from being substantive. One might then describethem as being ephemeral! But it was an appalling situation which persisted for years andyears. I smashed my head against a brick wall on this one repeatedly with the ExecutiveOffice with...

28. SBT: Even with Tarzie,.

28. JW: Well, Tarzie didn’t do very much about this because Tarzie was not much on management.I didn.t succeed with Karl-Enc. I never succeeded with Jim. I can’t remember if I ever tried

with Maggie. Richard was very much focussed on programme issues and programme staffand I think he went along - probably still does go along - with the view that the progmmmestaff are the elite and the substantive people. Now, without belittling the central role ofprogramme people, this is a very dangerous position to take because it means as far asinformation and communication - that’s what we are restricting ourselves here to - that youdon’t have the input of the highly professional people that UNICEF has gathered together,has employed to lead these areas. Often the information or communications officer wouldbe hired by a representative without the senior people in New York even knowing that thishas happened, let alone having any input in it and therefore, everything depended very muchon the representative or the regional director. Some of them had some background in thisarea and/or some genuine serious interest in the area and would make informed and goodchoices. hr many cases this is not what happened. In marry cases, people were selected whohad been old schoolmates of the representative or who krrew the son-in-law of the Ministerfor Planning in whichever country the representative was located. Or the representativewanted someone to write his or her speeches or run the library or place vanity articles in thelocal press. And in many cases, the information officers would be, as it were, seduced out

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of the area completely because the area in which they were supposed to be operating wasconsidered to be so low, so unimportant within the country office that they decided tomigrate or try to migrate to programming because that is where they saw the power existed.It was a pathetic situation. We would have meetings with the information staff who felt

completely isolated in the way that the whole thing was being structured. I could neverunderstand it. It seemed to me to be so obvious that you needed to have a seriousprofessional input. I’m not saying the representatives or the regional directors’ view shouldn’thave been taken into account but you needed to have professional expertise involved in theselection and evaluation of the staff concerned and that didn’t happen very often.Representative A would think the information officer was wonderful because she kept thelibrary running well and then representative B who came in 3 years later wanted speecheswritten or the information officer to look after the programme on broadcasting in someremote rural area. So it really was a failure, a massive failure in that whole area ofinformation and communication. UNICEF is still suffering from it now, although I think inrecent years the situation has improved.

29. SBT: What about the regional level, John? Wasn’t that pivotal?

29. JW: hr some ways, it was even worse at the regional level. Firstly, a number of senior UNICEFstaff, D2 Directors, even Executive OffIce people, couldn’t understrmd the difference betweenan information ofticer and a communication officer and people would be appointed who hadone skill and not the other. I had actually attended an SSR - the only one I ever attended inmy life and that was by accident. I was waiting for some other meeting in which I heard thedecision made on a completely misunderstood basis as to what the staff member was capableof doing - the senior staff had not a clue. But then when I say it got worse, it got worsebecause it was decided that these people shouldn’t be communication officers, shouldn’t beinformation officers. They should be external relations officers which meant absolutelynothing. External relations meaning what? They were to work with NGOS, they were toraise finds, maybe work with the media? I mean the whole list of things they should do -where was the professional formation for this? There wasn’t one so the regional people who

otlen, to a certain point, had strong professional backgrounds, they disappeared. If you lookback to the 1970s with people like John Balcomb, Don Allan, and so on, you had people withreally strong media backgrounds. Well, it wasn’t obviously a clean sweep. There were someregional dkectors who thought it was a good idea to have someone to keep looking afler themedia but, in many cases, that wasn’t the way it happened. That was a failure in New York,a lack of understanding of the importance of information and communication.

30. SBT: It wasn’t their priority?

30. JW: Well.. With Jim, it was strange because it was his priority, but he just didn’t want to getinto the management issues. He wanted to fix it more quickly and therefore, he didn’t wantto fuss around..

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31. JW: And also, the idea then that the regional directors were to be treated like dukes at one level.F in that they were paid a great deal of lip service. They came to New York and there were all

these special meetings with the Executive Director and the Deputies. They’d be taken todinner and theater and God knows what and their opinions sought on all manner of matters,marry of which were not of direct concern to them. But when it came to actual authority,many of them had very little as far as running the countries in their region are concerned oninformation and communication and indeed, for that matter, on everything else. That wasanother very stnk]ng example of the lack of management that UNICEF suffered from. I amnot trying to judge the current administration because I think it’s too early but you can seethat they are at least trying to do something about this area.

32. SBT: What would you consider to be a viable structure, given the fact that you are always dealingwith change and you’re dealing with some strong individuals and some weak ones as longas we have such a regional and country setup?

33. JW: I don’t think it is very difficult to do. You needed a~eement between the representative,the regional director, and the director of the appropriate division in New York on staffingquestions. Lacking that agreement, the matter should go up to the Executive Office certainly,this should apply on all matters to do with information and communication, and might also

apply in other areas in which the representatives are not specialists. Now, if that had beendone and if the views of all the parties concerned had been given equal weight and thedecisions coming out of the Executive Office had fallen evenly, depending upon the meritsof the case, I think the situation would have been very rapidly resolved and the authorityreturned to some extent to New York because the field staff would not have wanted to haverisked an unfavorable decision coming out of the Executive Office unless they really feltstrongly about the matter.

34. JW: I think another area which where management was maybe worse was in relation to workingwith National Committees. There has never been - at least not since the very early days whenmaybe there were only a few national committees and probably one or two people wouldhave been able to handle the relationship - there has never been any effective focal point orsystem for working with committees so that you can have situations which are of the most

appalling and blindingly obvious inanity. I had an example during the period when I wasExecutive Director of the National Committee in Australia in which the Committee hadwrongly allocated some of its payments to New York. It owed New York a certain amountof money, and the money had been paid. But instead of going to GCO, the money had goneto DFM and PFO. There was no interlinkage between these divisions so that GCO pursuedthe committee for the money almost to the point that the committee was obliged to gobankrupt. Finally, we all met in New York and the matter was resolved at the DeputyExecutive Director level. That is an extreme case. But if you look at it from the viewpointof a committee, and particularly a small and weak committee, it’s a bewildering array ofpeople you are working with. In recent years, responsibility has supposed to have been withthe Division for Public Affairs. But the Division for Public Affairs has been without any

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genuine authority, apart from the ability to call meetings and to issue papers. Even earlier,the fractured system of responsibility led to a series of recognition agreements whichthemselves were ambiguous and confusing and which are largely violated by many of themost important committees. We have a situation which is essentially out of control -financially, and administratively. When I say out of control financially, I don’t mean thatlarge amounts of money are being used for some wrong purpose. I mean simply thatUNICEF does not have the capacity to monitor those moneys. So if committee X decidesit is going to retain 30Y0, 350/0or 40°/0 when it should only retain 25°/0, there are all mannersof ways of hiding this money and it takes UNICEF years, if it ever does, to find out what isgoing on. The end result of this is - I find this very peculiar but it’s true - but the committeeswhich are really honest and admit that they have difficulties, they get hammered. And thosethat don’t aren’t, or at least are not most of the time. The US Committee has gotten awaywith it year after year atler year. Now sort of in parallel with this confusion about how towork with most of the committees on finances, on private sector fundraising, on greetingcards, on media, publications, on NGOS, on Goodwill Ambassadors, on special events, allof these areas have been ambiguous. The situation has been compounded, if this is possible,by an equally, I was going to say cloudy, but that’s not strong enough, I mean equally insanelack of structure between the secretariats in New York and Geneva so that the authority ofthe director in Geneva has either been undefined or defined but subject to such dispute thatit has been essentially undefined, so it’s either been disputed, undefined or both. Since 1981-2, since Aida Gindy’s departure from Geneva

34. SBT: And even then..

34 JW: And even then it was in dispute but at least you could see what the dispute was about. Sincethen apart from some brief periods, it has been very hard to see what the reality was.

35. JW It is entirely possible to construct guidelines which would effectively delimit the relationshipof power between New York and Geneva. People haven’t wanted to do this for a number ofreasons beginning with what I would call regional directors’ syndrome - that many of thedirectors in Geneva have either been regional directors or wish they had been and saw theirrole as running a region in the same way that the regions in Africa or Asia are regions, but,of course, Geneva and Western Europe is not a region in the same sense because it is a regionwith essentially global responsibilities. It is more than a regional office because a lot of theresponsibility is in the media and communications area, working with NGOS, working withnational committees, to some extent, working with fundraising. Certainly the whole GCOarea in promoting cards and in private sector fundraising - all of these transcend Europe. Sothat the attempts to make it into a regional oftlce have always puzzled me because it seemedtome that the Director in Geneva has belittled rather than maximized the potential authoritythat he would have. The problem has been twofold. Firstly, I think that people in theExecutive Office have never really understood Geneva. I don’t think, as far as I can recall,there’s ever been anybody in the Executive Office who has ever served in Geneva andtherefore, they don’t understand how it works and how important it is and secondly, there’s

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always been this desire that the whole thing can be turned around on personalities, that youknow this person really isn’t the right one, we need a different kind of person in Geneva.That is, of course, to some extent true. It always is that you can influence bad stmctures withthe right people but then you have to choose the right people all the time. I don’t think thathas otlen been done either. It’s added to the confusion that we’ve just discussed, around thewhole relationship with the national committees. I think that the responsibility of theExecutive Office during the Jim Grant period was really very great in not bringing clarity tothis area. I sometimes wondered how, in fact, UNICEF did so well in its communication andinformation activities, given the fact that the structures were so incomplete and weak andtreacherous in some ways in the sense that there was no way you could put any weight onthem without falling through the floor.

36. JW: I guess to summarize on information and communication in the Grant period that UNICEF,with the exception of education for development, made very important gains. A number ofthese gains were due to Jim Grant’s own enormous drive, imagination and determination.There’s no question about that. I think a number of them were due to the fact that UNICEF,

as far back as I can remember, and I think some people would say back into the 1960s, orcertainly the very early 1970s, UNICEF had always recruited well in its New Yorkinformation area at the senior level. Obviously, not everybody was good but there was a verylarge percentage of very competent people and the organization, despite all of the belief thatthe progmnrtne was the substantive area, nevertheless devoted substantial financial resourcesto information and to communication. I think having Tarzie Vittachl in position advocatingfor the importance of information and communication was a very important point but he wasthere, of course, because Jim Grant put him there. I think Tarzie’s role has to be seen reallyas one which was essentially secondary to Jim’s in this area... I think the driving force wasJim Grant. My bitter disappointment was that these enormous gains were not consolidatedwith strong management at the interfaces between New York and Geneva, between NewYork and the regions, between the regions and the countries and between New York and thecountries, and, on the other hand, between New York and the National Committees, betweenGeneva and the National Committees. I think in all these areas there had been major failings.Had proper management gone into those areas, UNICEF’s position now as a global leaderin this area and as an organization to be admired and emulated would be unassailable. I thinkit is already strong and UNICEF is already to some extent emulated, if you look at a numberof senior UNICEF people from this area who have gone into other organizations to run theirinformation service. Three or four years ago, Mehr was at a meeting of UN informationdirectors. Let’s think about this for a second. The Information Director of UNESCO wasfrom UNICEF. The Information Director from IFAD was from UNICEF. The InformationDirector of the World Meteorological Organization was from UNICEF. The AssistantSecretary-General in charge of Information at the UN was from UNICEF and his deputy wasfrom UNICEF. There was a very broad sweep of UNICEF people who’d been pulled intoother agencies and there would have been more too, if there had been enough people to goaround. Soon atlerwards, of course, even the UNDP Information Director had come fromUNICEF.

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37. SBT: Who was home minding the shop?

37. JW: Well, these are people who’d all moved on. In the case of some of them, in the case ofHelene Gosselin, for example, who I think has been an excellent Director of Information atUNESCO, people for whom at the time there just wasn’t room to go to the top in UNICEF.

38 JW: There’s one area I should have covered in talking about relationship between the authorityof people concerned with information and comrnrmication in New York and those at the fieldlevel - the question of the levels of responsibility, the levels ofrecruitrnent. These posts weregiven different levels in different countries and in different situations even when the workwas exactly the same. There wasn’t any policy that information and communication staffshould be interacting with each other. Nor was there any policy which laid down that theyshould be directly connected, at least the senior information person to the representative andthe communication officers to the programme area. So the interlinkages between therepresentative, the senior programme officer, the senior information officer, the seniorcommunications officer were entirely arbitrary. I drew up a system myself at one stage andprepared to argue with the Executive OffIce that this system should be put in place. It showedthat the information and communication section should be interlinked and that there shouldbe this direct responsibility to the representative and the representative should be responsiblefor them in certain ways. I wrote all this up and we had charts and so on and everyone in theExecutive Office said, ‘Yeah, that’s geat, that’s tine. Let’s do it.’ It was issued and that wasthe end of it because there was never any ownership or any desire to push it. We otlen hadthe situation where Jim himself would fly in and he would talk to the President or the PrimeMinister or whoever the key ministers were and he would get them all activated about theimportance of immunization. But because in one country, there was an effective informationcommunications system with people operating, let’s say at the L3, L4 levels and workingwith each other, that was effectively transmitted and the representative understood theimportance of it and therefore, worked with the lower structures of the Administration tobring it about. That happened. hr the country next door, with the same population, on thesame GNP, you might very well have one L2 or an NOB doing the whole thing. An NOBperson, usually subject to some kind of government oversight and therefore, unable tocommunicate things which the government didn’t want to have communicated. So there wasno system and the lack of system, I think really was a large part of what led to the blockages

that impacted on UCI, for example, and what UNICEF did was to try to compensate for thisby putting all the responsibility on the representative and making the representative and thegovernment too, responsible for delivering certain goals at certain levels. There is noquestion that in many cases, the achievements in immunization were below those that werereported because people were just terrified to report the truth. It was considered bad formto dwell too long or even at all on the complexities of the situation, or in some cases onwhatever the urgent national priorities might be as compared to the global goals. I believethat what should have been done in this area was a much more concerted effort to train the

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representatives and senior pro~amme staff and the communications staff too, in the

7 importance of the kind of tasks that they were being asked to do..

39. SBT: Well, it was seen as a contradiction to the country programme.

39. JW: Yes, it was seen as a contradiction to the country programme and, of course, to a certainextent it was and..

39. SBT: Some of it was.

40. JW: Yes, I agree. Some of it was. Not all of it. And there you came up again against and wehaven.t talked about this because this is really not within the parameters of the informationand communication area which we’ve tried to stay within, I am not sure very successfully,but we.ve tried, and that was the extraordinarily messy relationship between the regionaldirector and the representative. So you ended up with a system where many representativesfelt that they were being strongarmed by New York and if they didn’t do what they werebeing told and if these figures didn’t bloody well improve by next Thursday, they were inserious difficulty and their careers might well be looked at very carefully by the ExecutiveOffice. Well...,;

. .

40, SBT: and that was true,

41. JW: I think it was true and you know there are not that many truly courageous people in life.Very few people are willing to risk everything for their beliefs and their convictions, Most

people risk something but there are not that many who are really willing to put their kids’education and everything else on the line and so they compromise and fudged and hedgedand it was a shame because God knows the achievement itself was quite spectacular as itwas.

41. SBT: There was really no need for it.

41. JW: No, there was no need for it.

41. SBT: And that message hadn’t come through.

42. JW: They were always looking for more. It was never enough, Of course, development isalways a process. You don’t say, .OK, right, well, we’ve gotten to a certain point. Let’s stopdevelopment work in Ruretania for the next five years.’ I didn’t mean that. But there wasnever a point where the urgent pressure came off many of these countries. I am nowwandering far from my own area of expertise - but a lot of the structures that would havesupported this kind of activity on a medium and long- term base was simply not in place.UNICEF was too busy rushing around trying to get the policemen to vaccinate kids orwhatever, to concern itself with that. God knows impatience is needed in development - look

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at some of the specialized agencies - they are still going to be there 50 years from nowfiddling around - but there was an impatience which was an extreme impatience and I wouldsay that the points we’ve mentioned before in relation to education for development, forexample, the impatience with primary education, tit into the same category.

42, SBT: You had to work with them. You couldn’t

42, JW: You had to work with them. And it was even difficult to establish really clear indicatorsof forward progress in some of them, although in education for development if anyone wasreally interested, it wouldn’t have been that difficult because putting curricula insertionswould have been one measure.

43. JW: I think the criticism of the Grant period, in the sense that history bothers itself with UNICEFat all, is essentially going to be focussed on these areas. History will probably concern itselfwith UNICEF because UNICEF’s role in social development in the 1980s and the 1990s hasbeen very important. The achievements and the failings, both are going to be very marked.It was a pity that for a long time, particularly in the later years, everything had to be always

perfect. I don’t mean the situation of children but I mean everything UNICEF was doing hadto be perfect. I think it would have been better had a couple of things happened. It wouldhave been better if Jim Grant had a really senior manager who was entrusted with a lot of themanagement of the organization and without his direct involvement, allowing him to carryon with the magnificent work that only he could actually do. That is not in any sense tonguein cheek. I mean it’s true. If some of these other areas had been more thoroughly explored ....There’s no question that primary education was simply just left to wither on the vine foryears. hr the second half of the 1980s, for example, very little pressure came from NewYork, or not any pressure, I mean very little support, ideas, money, anything.

43. SBT: Education really stands out as one of the traditional progmrnme emphases that got lost.

44. JW: Yes. These are alla continuum and you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have

health without nutrition, etc. But if you want to move forward, if you want one generationto be better than the previous one, in terms of its understanding of its environment and itsplace within it, and how to improve people’s lives, then you can’t do it without education.God knows Australia is totally preoccupied with the problem of the Australian Aborigines

who have been appallingly treated and still are, although not, of course, in the same way asthey were in earlier generations, but I’m constantly stuck that all of the efforts are focussedon health, housing and employment, or at least all of the visible efforts. I spent most of 1995in Sydney and read a lot about the situation of Aborigines. I can’t recall a single article whichdealt with problems of education, with primary education. I don’t understand why this is.It just is incomprehensible. It’s, I guess in a way, you have to say that it’s a reflection of

paternalism and that you know what these people need and its things they need which aregoing to make them better. I’ve not thought about this until this conversation but I thinkUNICEF itself may end up being charged with paternalism because of its neglect of

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education. Once you’ve educated someone, you’ve set that person free. Not that UNICEFdidn’t want to set them free but I think UNICEF was concerned about itself and what it coulddo- more than setting people free.

45. SBT: Yes, well, there was a great deal of hesitation to go that level and it didn’t actually comeabout until after the Convention as the follow-up thought on what actually all this meant.Even today it has not yet been well thought through in progamme in terms.

45. JW: Yes, well we didn’t talk about the Convention and we should talk about it briefly.

46.SBT: Perhaps, we should talk first about the Executive Board and how you became involved inthat. That should lead us to the Convention.

46. JW: How did I get involved in the UNICEF Executive Board? Well.. essentially because BjomOldaeus was dying and he had always wanted to be Director of PFO. Even then it struck meas an odd decision to make him Director of PFO but the argument was that OSEB was toopressured - not all the time - because there was only the one major Board a year, but withina period around that major Board of say, two, three months a year, the Director of OSEBSjob was nuder enormous pressure which indeed it was, with often working 14, 16, 18 hoursa day and therefore, his health at that stage simply couldn’t stand it. I’m sure it was true butthen moving him into PFO to be Director of what I would argue is one of the key divisionsin UNICEF didn’t seem to me to be such a smart idea. In the end, of course, although Bjomdid very well in the short time that he was able to work effectively, it soon became to toomuch for him too. I always thought he should have been made a Special Adviser to theExecutive Director and be freed from this kind of responsibility. Jim was not quite sure whatto do. I don’t know why he thought of me. He also thought of Mehr because she was at thatstage the Deputy Director of PFO and he thought of moving her into OSEB. In the end, hedecided to move me and move her into what was becoming DOI, which had been theDivision of Information and Public Affairs up to that point. I found OSEB to be a verychallenging job.

I think the job of the Secretary of the Board is a very political post. I don’t believe it is a postfor party loyalists who are going to give the straight party line for the Executive Office. Itrequires someone who is interested in listening very carefully to the delegations and acting,to some extent, as an honest broker between the Executive Office and the Executive Director,in particular. My responsibilities were essentially to Jim and not to anyone else in this job.And, in fact, I reported directly to him and the key Board people on the other hand. So

pushing the UNICEF party line was, I always thought, a very ill fated way of looking at it andI resisted doing it. What I tried to do was listen to both sides and try to persuade each sidethat there was some common ground. I think that often worked. This idea in the Secretmiatthat a lot of the Board Delegates are really just Third Secretaries who are young and not verybright is completely idiotic. They maybe young and they may not have had the experiencethat senior UNICEF people have had, they+-eare in their 30s and UNICEF people are in their

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50s and 60s, so there is no way in which they could have the same experience, but theyhaven’t been sent by key governments to New York because they are not bright. There hasalways been a massive underestimation of the role that these people play and I tried to correetthat and to work with them. I was pleased with my time in OSEB. I think it was a success.Even Jim, I think, who didn’t have that high a regard for me essentially, was impressed. I

know this from what he told other people. I was very happy with that period.

However, it was also a period during which the mistrust of the Executive Office had reacheda crescendo. That was because of all Jim’s famous end runs around the Board via theircapitals - on the World’s Summit for Children - where he probably had to end- run them orhe wouldn’t have gotten it. Jim had gotten into the habit of end running the Board. If hecould not get what he wanted with the Board members, he would phone up the capitals and,of course, someone born the senior level would phone up the Mission and the Mission wouldbe called off and Jim would win - but at a cost because then the Mission would lie and waitfor another occasion and bang UNICEF over the head. That is how UNICEF ended up withthe Management Study, with the Booz Allen Management Study, because some of theseextremely intelligent Board delegates from Canada and Denmark and a couple of othercountries, but particularly those two countries, decided that it was time the Board tried totake control of the Board and not leave it in the hands of the Secretariat. They did so andthen having done so, they decided that they would warn the Secretariat by leaving thepossibility of a future management survey in a resolution thinking that when the time camethey would not start the survey. By the time it came to consider the survey, they had all beenposted somewhere else and people didn’t remember and everybody said, ‘What a ~eat idea.Yeah, let’s have a management study of UNICEF.’ That is literally how the managementstudy of UNICEF grew out of a time bomb, a delayed time bomb of distrust in the way thatthe Executive Office operated,

47. SBT: Would you tell us a bit more about the World Summit for Children. That must have beenquite an experience.

47. JW: I have to confess that I think the World Summit for Children - not so much because of whatit did - but because of the organization that brought it about, was in some ways Jim Grant’sfinest performance. Although my personal bent is not towards these extravaganzas, you haveto hand it to him - it was really a masterful performance. I really hardly believed it was goingto happen myself until, I was in one of those inner conference rooms in the UN, I think wesat there for something like sixteen or seventeen hours - those of us who were in thatconference room - it was the sort of the main center for the direction of everybody outsideand the staff, and it wasn’t until I saw Maggie Thatcher, on one of the monitors, getting outof the car and coming into the Secretariat that I really believed it was going to happen. TheAmericans resisted it right up until the last minute and a number of other countries includingAustralia pretended it wasn’t happening until the last minute. Hawke, who was thenAustralia’s Prime Minister, to his shame, didn’t attend. But it was an extraordinaryperformance. I was in charge of the liaison with the Missions and what I had to do was really

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close down OSEB at this time. I literally moved all the OSEB staff (apart from FrancoiseCoupet, who was my assistant and Marjorie Newman-Black who was one of theprofessionals) to another floor. We setup cubicles within OSEB and then we selected whowe thought were some of the best people in UNICEF who weren’t already on the WorldSummit for Children and put them into pairs to handle groups of Missions. The originalExecutive Office idea, which was Mike Showers’, supported by Jim, was that this should bedone on an interagency basis. I should recruit people from UNDP and UNFPA and Godknows where else, and they should all be brought in to do this. Failing to convince theExecutive Office that this was a half witted idea, I simply ignored it and all hell broke losebut not until I had everything else in place with UNICEF people and it was too late. Mikewas extremely unhappy and conveyed this to Jim, who I think was unhappy because Mikewas unhappy. In any event, the whole thing worked extremely well. We had somewonderfid, wonderfid people working with us - including people like Steve Woodhouse andKathy Cravero. There were some wonderful moments.

47. SBT: I was jealous. I so wanted to come back and work on that.

48. JW: There was one delegation, one of the Africa delegations, that had these huge numbers ofcars that they wanted to be in the entourage, about 6 or 8 cars. I was walking around thesedesks and whoever it was on the desk tamed to me with their request and said: ‘What are wegoing to do?’ I said ‘Tell them to hire a school bus.’ And they did. And they all rolled up ina school bus. There was this other African mission that had not paid the rent and I would getprogress reports. (R wasn’t as if they were running off with the rent money. They hadn’tbeen paid by the capital for 6 or 9 months.) They had started out with half a floor of abuilding and by the time we got to the World Summit, there was just the ambassador and Ithink one secretary who was sort of cornered in one last office. All the rest of the space hadbeen commandeered by whoever had the ownership of the building. It was very comic, ifyou weren’t involved, and very sad for them. It was an extraordinary time, quiteunbelievable, but it worked, The Heads of State all lined up to have their picture taken likelittle lambs.

49. JW: There was one other thing I should have said on information and the lack of policy.Perhaps, one of the most striking examples was the creation of DIPA, which had been up tothat point just the Division of Communications and Information. Jim wanted to have abroader Division of Information and Public Affairs, which was to include NGOS and hemoved the NGO Unit, which already existed, into DIPA, but then he wanted to create anumber of other areas - working with parliamentarians and African eminent persons and soon and he did this by simply telling me to do it. There were no more posts and there was nomore money. I was given people, some people, but people had to be put on posts when theyfell vacant. So DIPA with all of these new areas (many of which have since disappeared)was actually constructed out of the Communication and Information Division. For me, thatperiod which would have been 1987-88, was my worst at UNICEF because I felt the wholesituation was out of control. There was no support; there was no money, we were being

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constantly led off in new directions. I had to act, not so much as the Director of the Divisionbut more like the Chief of the local tirehouse, running the truck to wherever the latestconflagration had broken out or where I thought it might, rather than doing any planning.I was going to say little thanks I got fkom the Executive OffIce for all of this, but that would

bean exaggeration, there were no thanks!

50. JW: What I got was criticism for not having come up with some more new brilliant ideas thatother people were constantly presenting them with. It was all I could do at that point to keepup with the ideas we already had, let alone come up with some new ideas. That period afterTarzie’s departure was really very difficult for me. And Jim was increasingly occupied withimmunization. There was no real support from the Executive Office at all and littleunderstanding of the enormous pressures that were put on the Division and the people inNew York. That was simply symptomatic of what had been going on but gradually gettingworse over a long time over lack of any management.

51. SBT: How did Information and Communication cope with the Mid-Decade Goals on top of allof that?

51. JW: You mean the Mid-Decade Goals now?

51. SBT: No, when they first emerged, when the idea first emerged. When was it -1992.

52. JW: I think I was practically gone by then Sheila.

52. SBT: Safely out of the way.

53. JW: I think we better just continue here a minute in the time ander Mehr as Director becauseonce that once DIPA was effectively broken into two divisions, the Division of Information(later Communication) on one side and the Division of Public Affairs on the other, thesituation improved considerably, The focus was much clearer. I personally think Mehr hasbeen a superlative Director. That we are married and that I can be accused of beingprejudiced is obvious, but I think she’s been one of the geat New York directors and I thinkthe Division of Communication at this point, is better, much better than it has ever been. Ithink it is excellently staffed with almost no exceptions whatsoever. I think making thechange, when it came in 1989, was a very good one and it led to a revitalization of theinformation area in UNICEF and, to some extent, to a redressmerrt of some of these problemsof the relationships with regional offices, for example, or the role that DOC would have inpersomel selection. Some of that began to be addressed. The Executive Office at themoment is trying to address everything simultaneously so it is sometimes quite difficult tosee. There is so much smoke up in the air that it is difficult to see where the fighting is onthe ground but they are also moving in many of these areas to bring clarity. But I think inthe final years it was much better and the division between the two divisions made it easier.Contrary to many expectations, there was not any fratricidal struggle between DOC and

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DPA. Although, obviously, there were misunderstandings from time to time, I’m not sayingthat everything was perfect, it worked pretty well. DOC was then able to get back to someof the more core elements of the work, particularly the media work and the television work,for which it was responsible, It hadn’t actually left these areas, of course, but it was able toget more serious directional attention.

SIDE 2 TAPE2

54. JW: I think things improved still firther. Then with people like Shalini Dewarr in charge ofpublications and Emily Booker in charge of media and Bill Hetzer still there, still doing avery good job on television, with a strong media person in Marie Heuze in Geneva, andreporting, with a clear reporting relationship, back to New York which was tinally agreed.I think horn that viewpoint it began to get a lot better.

54. SBT: Some of the basics were back.

54: JW: Some of the basics began to get back in place but none of this, of course, addresses manyof the other criticisms.

● 54 SBT: Still, the country linkages and levels... remain to be resolved?

54. JW: Yes.

54. JW: But it did get better, no question, it did get better.

55. SBT: Do you think within UNICEF today there is a comprehension of the impact ofcommunication? Has the message really come home? How important is this?

55. JW: Well, I have not worked very closely with Carol Bellamy. The working relationship thatwe have had was firstly when I was with UNICEF Australia and secondly, with GCO, had

been uniformly positive and effective. I worked, to some extent, also with Stephen Lewisand with Karin Sham Poo too, but in this particular area - I am talking about the importanceof education, there is no question that both Carol and Stephen have very much understoodthe importance of these areas. And they are both politicians, after all.

56. JW: When we began talking the other day I think I said that one of UNICEF’s failings in theExecutive Office historically has been its lack of political skills. Most of the senior staff whohave been in the Executive Oftlce have not been political. I don’t mean political in the senseof party political but I mean people without any political capacities to any useful extent.That’s not true now. I think that the understanding of the importance is there. That, ofcourse, doesn’t translate into necessarily putting the right structures into place to effect it.That’s much more difficult and much more complicated and much more iffy.

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56. SBT: That’s quite an interesting observation because if you look back through the history of

7 UNICEF, Maurice Pate was not a politician but, in fact, was a very good politician. And toa lesser extent, Harry, well, he made being nonpolitical an art which made him a verypolitical animal but not necessarily a political professional. And this new regime... and Jim,of course, was Jim.

56. JW: Jim was not political at all. Jim just pushed through. I always thought that Jim simplycouldn’t be bothered with obstacles. He just went straight through them and once he got tothe other end, if looking back he thought that some of the obstacles needed to be looked atand peoples feelings massaged then he would sometimes go back and do that but he didn’tallow the obstacles to stop him along his path. I don’t think Harry was really political, notin quite the sense I mean, He was too cautious to be really political.. Whereas Stephen istruly political. Stephen is willing to go to the brink and maneuver on the brink. I’ve seenhim do it. I’ve done it with him. It is quite fun. But it’s very different tiom the way it wouldhave been done in the past. And Tarzie too was, I think we said the other day, genuinelypolitical. Sometimes Tarzie’s huge ego got in his way. Politically, he was usually prettyastute. When we talk about politics, we’re talking about a capacity to read a situation for thedistribution of power and Tarzie could do that. So could Marco Vianello-Chiodo.

● 57SBT: Yes. Wouldyouliketopassafewthou@tsonsomeindividualsthatyou.vemetalongtheway, who you were particularly impressed by, cared about? You mentioned earlier, forexample, Jaques Danois.

57. JW: Jacques was an extraordinarily gifted correspondent, a fine writer, a very complexpersonality. Don Allan is a superb writer, I think, and gifted with a wonderful sense ofhumor. John Balcomb was also, a very good writer and one of the few who had the capacityto genuinely straddle the information and communication area and be comfortable in both.If we are looking at total professionals in this area, it depends to some extent how one is

defining professional. Is one talking about their professionalism in media work, or is onetalking about their professionalism in UNICEF’s structure. I think if we are talking aboutprofessionalism within a media area, it would impossible to go beyond Claire Bnsset. I thinkClaire Brisset was unbeatable from that viewpoint and still is absolutely superb. If you arelooking at people who are able to combine that with a capacity to work with maximumeffectiveness within a bureaucracy, well, let’s see, Morten Gersing and Emily too, for thatmatter. I think the people who are around now are as good as they ever have been, in fact,in that area.

Within UNICEF as a whole if we are going back over 20 years, apart from Jim Grant whowe’ve talked about a lot, there’s no question in my mind that the giant was Dick Heyward,no question. He wanted to control everything. He was sometimes extremely difficult tounderstand. He was very low profile but if we are talking about importance in shaping theorganization, in intelligence, integrity and commitment, and strength, then I don’t think it ispossible to go beyond Dick Heyward. I never knew Maurice Pate but I would guess that he

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probably would stand alongside the others. I’m not putting Harry Labouisse down in saying, this. I just really think that in many fundamental ways, if you are talking about the growth

of the UNICEF tree and how it became what it is, Dick Heyward would probably be mynumber one pick. I think he was the trunk. A number of other people who I think performedsuperbly for UNICEF over a long period of time, I would find it hard it go into the earliergenerations, but with those with whom I overlapped, people like Gordon Carter and MartinSandberg were absolutely outstanding. In the later generations, I find it more difficult tomake choices I think some of the regional directors who are really now extremely competentpeople. I think Karl Eric Knutsson in many ways was a very influential and good personwithin the UNICEF structure. Maybe it has to do with the age of the organization that peoplemake more of a lasting contribution in the early days of an organization than in the later daysunless they really are quite extraordinary as Jim Grant was. Of course, I was younger andtherefore, less cynical, and more admiring of certain people but I would find it diftlcult to gobeyond people like Gordon and Martin and Aida Glndy who I thought was a superb person.

58. SBT: Would you like to add some thoughts about Aida and your stay in Geneva?

58. JW: Alda is wondertid to work with. Although there was this constant collision with New York

● over fundraising - I think it was Sasha Bacic - Aida led a Geneva Office which maybe hadits zenith at that point, stronger than it had been in the Gordon Carter and earlier periodsbecause it was covering much more of a range and getting much more into work withNational Committees which was headed up by Reinhard Freiberg with the assistance ofUmberto Cancellieri, and fundraising headed up Dons Much, for most of the time, andinformation, first by Don Allan and then by me. Without patting myself on the back in thislisting, it was a fairly strong group of people and...

58. SBT: And a harmonious group?

59 JW: Yes and it went very well. Aida was a wonderful team leader and she was a politician.Sometimes Aida could stand up in the most complex difficult gathering and make a speechand have everyone beaming from ear to ear clapping wildly including you, yourself, and thenfive minutes after it was over, you tell yourself, Now what did Aida say? I must repeat thisto so-in-so.. You had no bloody clue as to what it was. It was all waffle, but it was suchsuperb waffle and so politically astute waffle that it 100’%served the purpose which was todeliver something which made everyone happy. Then she would goon and try and deal withthe situation. Aida was a very, very bright lady indeed, and a very good, nice person.

59. JW: Well, I probably left out some people who I would have wanted to have referred to, but itcan’t be helped.

● 6O.SBT:Joti,justonefinaltiou@t.hotingnowtowwdstieyew2OOOmdtiechm~ngsiWationof children, and in the organization, what emphases do you think should be taken up?

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60. JW: Well, I’m glad we touched on this because I think that with the Convention. UNICEF needs< to proceed with a very clear mind. I’ve been reading a number of documents recently in

which the main purpose of the writers seems to be to convey the message that such and suchare happening in such and such country and this is not only against Article 9 but Article 13,23,86 and 144 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child. who cares except people whoare professionally involved with the Convention? The Convention, hopefully, will go on tobecome much more prominent in public perception than it is now. It would have beenhelped, I think, during the last years of the Grant regime, if there had been a little moreconcentration on the substance of the Convention and not total fixation on ratification at anycost so that countries which took a lot of time to ratify, like New Zealand or France, becausethey wanted to make sure the national legislation was properly lined up, could be castigatedwhile some unnamed dictatorship (All you had to do was have the representative drive overto the palace, have the dictator sign it.) would be fine. That is pretty silly. I think from anadvocacy viewpoint UNICEF must prioritize. I don’t mean it has to prioritize within theConvention. It has to prioritize the message that it is conveying. If it tries to convey all themessages in the Convention more or less equally, it will not be heard.

61. SBT: Then the lesson of the State of the World’s Children Report has not been understood?

● ,2, JW: Well, this year the -is going to be on child labor and after many ups and downs andtos and fros and wild swings of optimism and pessimism and sometimes, almost suicidaldespair, I think it is probably going to be OK. That was an important move for UNICEF tomake because it hadn’t moved into child labor at all and didn’t have any position on childlabor. UNICEF should have positions and should be active in these areas. I would continueto push for primary education. I think that is the great unaddressed issue. And there has tobe watchfulness continuing on the health questions. There is no doubt that UNICEF has tomove more and more into many of the major child treatment issues: how our society treatschildren through labor, through prostitution, and so on. A lot of those issues must be morecarefully addressed. I think the big questions facing UNICEF in the future will be to whatextent it funds programmed and advocates for them and to what extent it advocates forprogrammed. You and I know this has been the subject around for a number of years.

63. JW: Advocacy, in my view, by definition, has to be greater for some issues than for others.Now this isn’t a sort of supermarket approach to the Convention saying that some issues inthe Convention need to be given priority over others in any long- term sense or that youknow the issues around primary education are more important than the issues aroundinternational adoption. Theyke not. The plight of the child in Mali, the nine-yew old girl inMali, who has never been to school is no more grave than the plight of the three-year oldRomanian who has been sold across the border to Hungary into some totally ill-definedfuture in international adoption. He may, in fact, be worse off. But one has to deal withrealism on the current magnitude of some of these issues. It doesn’t mean that UNICEFshouldn’t concern itself with the Romanian orphans either but how mm”y millions of pre-teenage African and Asian girls are not in school? So, I think there is a risk here of trying

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to be perfect in which UNICEF becomes rather impractical and maybe, a somewhat naive

c organization. I wouldn’t have thought either of these adjectives described Carol Bellamy.

Therefore, the chances of it happening in the medium-term are not very great but certainly,if you look around now, the signs that a number of people are moving in that direction arethere, I think,

63. SBT: I think so also.

64. JW: We should continue to hammer the Convention, continue to push it, continue to say thatit should be the foundation on which the programmed are built, do everything we can toanchor it, but we have to work from the Convention into advocacy that can be understoodby the general public who do not, and who never will, know the Convention as well asUNICEF does.

65. SBT: Taking your point about the magnitude of the issue and looking at what really are the basicvalues that underpin the organization, you’re talking about justice and equity.

●65. JW: Yes.

65. SBT: That’s a better line to take than looking at a particular article. It is much easier for everyoneto understand and the Convention, as all of us who have read it know, it is not all thathelpful.

66. JW: I completely agree, One has to look at the major themes that emerged from the Conventionrather than look at the individual paragraphs that are being violated by certain situations.Some three or four years ago I did a study for UNESCO in which I read a number ofUNESCO documents on their work. The listing of the Conventions therein and theviolations of certain articles was very sad because the Conventions were hallowed documentswhich nobody knew anything about. We have to avoid that. The Convention has to itselfbe given some personality. It is not a collection of numbered articles unless you are actuallyin the Committee in Geneva or talking about how your country is meeting or not meeting itsobligations.

67. JW: I also think that this new insistence that all countries must be simultaneously able to meetall the responsibilities to which they have subscribed in the Convention is a little wacky. Itis clearly not possible for all of these countries to meet all of these obligations. If it was, thenwe wouldn’t be needing the Convention in the tirst place. You can say, ‘OK if say Mali wereto demobilize its army then you would have enough money to send all the children to school.’I don’t know if it is true or not, but I’d imagine it is. That is not saying much because it is

going against, and here we come back to politics, it’s going against the political reality of therulers of Mali. If the President of Mali was to abolish the army tomorrow morning, hewouldn’t be President of Mali tomorrow allemoon and he might not be around to be anvbodv. .

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anywhere. We have to push and struggle against power elites, but we ignore their power at2 our own peril and that’s what UNICEF sometimes looks as if it’s doing, But when you are

talklng about, not just the army, but if you say, OK, let’s divert 50 per cent of the money thatgoes into university education in Gabon to primary education, I am sure that would be ahighly desirable objective. I mean whose kids are in the tertiary education? Those of thepower elites. So, it’s no point us running around saying this or that should be done.

68. SBT: We are not putting the emphasis on what’s possible, not remembering Jim Grant’s list.

68. JW: This is where Jim Grant was so wise. Jim would find the chink that he could drive throughand where he could score without deep political cost to the country because he would convertit into a plus. That’s why President Salinas, wherever he now is, used to have Jim there sooften, Because Jim was good for him. There he was standing up for the kids of Mexico andpresumably, what Jim was urging him to do was also good for the kids of Mexico. So it waswhat Jim would have called a win-win-win situation. It was good for UNICEF, it was goodfor Salinas, and it was good for the kids of Mexico. So we need to be a little realistic aboutsome of this stuff. Otherwise, it’sjust nonsense, hr the West, in general, the assumption thatstructures in developing countries can be changed for the betterment of the entire populationovernight ignores a great deal of reality. It may be true that if you could change thestructures overnight there would be enormous improvement. If that could be done, are weso arrogant that we think that people there wouldn’t have done it? I mean do we think thatthey’re less smart than we are? They don’t do it because they can’t do it. Or because theydon’t want to. Because they are part of the elite themselves.

69. SBT: Which should lead to another question, but probably not today, and that’s really onattempting to facilitate empowerment because that’s an area where UNICEF is trying to havean impact and, of course, it goes back to the individual.

69. JW: I’mjust thinking about the question of empowerment. Well, let’s talk about it for a minute.UNICEF’s emphasis on empowerment at the local level, I basically agree with that premise.It’s good to do and in some cases, it does lead to empowerment and it does lead to

improvement in people’s lives. But it is a very slow process. UNICEF is not a revolutionaryorganization and if it was, then maybe the best approach would be to assassinate presidents,but UNICEF has never seen this as its role! UNICEF has historically tried to work withthose elements in society which are trying to give more power to the weaker elements insociety. But clearly UNICEF is operating within a limited frame and once you bump upagainst the borders of that frame then the power elites are going to be after you. The trick,I guess, is to bring about a certain amount of change within a context without bumping upagainst the borders but doing enough to get some sort of local autonomy going. I think thathappens in a number of cases in a number of countries but for the politically - I meanpolitically in a big sense now - for the politically committed, this is intensely unsatisfactorybecause it looks like a copout. It’s not because there’s no way that UNICEF can be a majorpolitical player. It can’t. It’s an international organization. That kind of change really has

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to come from the socially aware educated minorities within the country itself. Those peoples who are willing to challenge usually risk their lives to bring about that change, lose their

lives as well. UNICEF can’t do it. I think UNICEF sometimes talks this up too much. Weare for empowerment and changing society but let’s get real here, it’s within a relativelylimited context.

69. SBT: It’s giving support at community level and working through NGOS and institutions.

70. JW: Yes, but the NGOS, most of them can’t do that much either. Some of the national NGOScan start to work for improvement but in some ways they face the same constraints thatUNICEF does, once they move beyond a certain frame the Uzis are in the village the nextday. Power isn’t just power in a lot of the poorest countries, power is also survival. Poweris the good life. It’s not just exercising power to satisfy the ego. It’s sending your kids to thebest schools and being able to go to Paris or Madrid on vacation. The scarcer the availableresources, the more violent the struggle for power becomes. And dangerous too for allconcerned.

76. SBT: It is interesting that we are moving into this area now as it comes closer and closer to the

● reality in which we all live. We should be open to all the ramifications, as you suggest.

Thank you very much John.

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