Say Yes, 60th Anniversary Edition: Working with and for Children

UNICEF’s history encompasses many of the most important global issues of the past sixty years including health care for all, poverty elimination, disaster relief, education and children’s and women’s rights. The organisation’s founding principle that no child should have to endure hunger, ill health or lack of care is the cornerstone of development in this century.

Beginning

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund or UNICEF was formed out of what remained of the very first United Nations institution, the Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) which helped displaced adults and children towards the end of World War II. UNRAA was dismantled at the end of the War but its essential functions devolved to newly created UN institutions. UNICEF was created by the nascent United Nations to continue nutritional aid for children.

A policy of absolute equality for every child has shaped UNICEF since the beginning: the organisation’s first Executive Director, Maurice Pate, accepted his appointment only on the condition that the organisation would help children regardless of their nation’s role in the conflict. An active relief worker in Europe during both World Wars, Pate steered UNICEF to success in meeting the challenge of delivering milk and other foods — including whale meat at one point — to millions of children in Europe and Asia.

Unlike other UN institutions, UNICEF was conceived as a charitable concern and most of the organisation’s financial resources initially came from the United States where the first National Committee was established in 1947. In order to attract further funding from Europe, Pate helped set up a temporary UN Appeal for Children (UNAC) that same year. Acting independently, the network of UNAC committees proved successful in raising $30 million in funds for the UN — a third of which were allocated to UNICEF. Many of these UNAC committees later evolved into fully fledged national committees for UNICEF when the organisation’s continued existence was assured and its charitable status required that it should actively seek funding contributions to function. In 2005, national committees contributed 37% of UNICEF’s income.

The precedent of raising funds from cards based on the work of children as well as international artists such as Picasso, Dufy and Matisse was also established in these early days. The first UNICEF greetings cards, using a painting by a seven–year–old schoolgirl from Prague called Dzitka, were sold to raise funds in 1949.

Transition

The early strategy of promoting the long term benefits of health care for children, including immunisation as well as nutrition, was already underway by the end of 1947 when UNICEF supported a massive international campaign against tuberculosis in Europe — the largest vaccination campaign ever undertaken at that time — and the first occasion where the BCG vaccine was used outside of clinics. Medical breakthroughs in the technology and cost of immunisation led rapidly to further mass vaccination campaigns beginning with yaws in the equatorial regions of Asia and Africa.

In 1953, at the behest of the new nations of the developing world, UNICEF was established as a permanent UN institution. The organisation was re–styled as the United Nations Children’s Fund but kept the original UNICEF acronym.

Throughout the 1950’s UNICEF honed a system of delivering cheap but effective health care solutions with the guidance of the World Health Organisation (WHO). In areas where medical staff were scarce, such as in Haiti and Indonesia, the mobilisation of communities was critical and local volunteers including school children were trained to disseminate information and often administer simple treatments. The UNICEF/WHO partnership was successful in the fight against smallpox, polio and tuberculosis, continuing to the present day in strategies to combat measles and HIV/AIDS.

Development

By the turn of the 1960’s, the United Nations had shifted its focus from international security to fighting poverty, hunger and promoting economic stability. For children, this shift was marked with the unanimous adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of the Child by the UN General Assembly in 1959. The Declaration placed children and their needs firmly on the international agenda and for the first time identified hunger, poverty, disease and ignorance as a violation of the child’s rights to survival, well–being and development.

UNICEF was mandated to play a practical role in implementing the Declaration by continuing to provide health and nutritional aid. During the same month, however, Maurice Pate controversially sought the opinions of UNICEF staff around the world regarding the future direction of the organisation and found that a very different picture was emerging in the field. Experience of the previous decade had shown field workers that it was difficult and indeed counter–productive to separate children’s needs from those of their families and communities.

With the approval of the Executive Board, UNICEF initiated a ground–breaking Survey on the Needs of Children. Accompanied by reports from other UN bodies and twenty–four different countries, the Survey proved to be a turning point in both UNICEF and the United Nations’ outlook on the future course of development in its broadest sense.

Developing countries were seeking to improve whatever infrastructure they had, and in many cases creating an infrastructure where none had previously existed in order to benefit from the promise of economic growth. Since more resources were becoming available for investment in these countries, UNICEF’s task would be to ensure that a reasonable share would be used to improve the well–being of children in an integrated and effective form.

UNICEF took a leap forward from child health to a more holistic approach that included the social welfare and intellectual development of children. The growing network of country representatives sought to address the needs of the ‘whole child’ by working with ministries at every level of government on integrated country programmes. New areas of education, women’s issues, water and sanitation began to be explored alongside traditional areas of food, nutrition and maternal and child health. By the end of the decade, UNICEF’s argument that children are agents of change in a healthy society and that planning for development has everything to do with meeting their needs had gained legitimacy in the development debate.

The ‘quiet emergency’

By the 1970’s UNICEF was working both as an agent of development as well as humanitarian aid. The elimination of poverty promised by the economic expansion of the 1960’s had not happened and the UN declared a second decade of development. Maurice Pate’s successor, the second UNICEF Executive Director, Henry Labouisse, described the plight of half a billion children living at risk of famine as ‘the quiet emergency’.

Existing services modelled on those in industrialised countries were not structured appropriately for developing countries and UNICEF proposed a system of ‘basic services’ for children in the developing world that would be flexible enough to be adapted from one community to another. Volunteers would be trained in essential tasks such as baby weighing, early childhood learning and hand–pump maintenance. Limited numbers of trained professionals in a given area would be freed up to manage volunteers and services could be extended with the minimum of extra cost. By 1978, the worldwide restructuring of health delivery systems to encompass ‘primary health care’ for all citizens incorporated this method, empowering ordinary people in the provision of their own health care.

At the close of the decade, growing anxiety amongst non–governmental organisations over the fate of vulnerable groups, particularly children, led to the International Year of the Child in which UNICEF played a leading role. The success of the event, which raised global awareness of previously low–key issues such as children living on the street, orphans, refugees and children who were missing out on their education implied that the time was right for further action on behalf of children.

The child survival revolution

UNICEF entered the 1980’s with its third Executive Director, James Grant, proposing that whereas infant and child mortality rates were traditionally seen as indicators of development, a direct attack on these rates would, in fact, positively affect development.

A package of low cost techniques was put together for the world wide cause of child survival using four elements of primary health care: growth monitoring, oral rehydration therapy, breastfeeding and immunisation against the six vaccine–preventable childhood diseases — tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio and measles. Under Grant’s leadership, UNICEF gathered an unprecedented amount of national, international, public and private support for ‘the child survival revolution’ to place the cause at the top of the global agenda.

Universal immunisation very quickly became a priority for the whole primary health care movement and the campaign for national vaccination days extended beyond UNICEF to include WHO, Rotary Club International, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. Successful trials had already taken place in other countries but the system was proven here in Turkey when a massive drive in 1985 reached 84% of the target group of children.

Apart from saving the lives of millions of children, the ‘child survival and development revolution’ gave a new lease of life to the cause of human–centred development and placed children at the vanguard of change.

Recognising a common purpose between child survival and development and children’s rights, UNICEF added its voice to the growing movement for a legal instrument to protect children at the close of the decade. The organisation’s support was decisive in the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) by the UN General Assembly.

Children’s rights, women’s rights

As the CRC was adopted in September 1990, the new decade promised even greater commitment to children on the part of the international community. Newly mandated by the UN to promote and uphold the CRC, UNICEF convened the World Summit for Children (WSC) where 159 countries committed to reducing infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition and illiteracy by 2000 as well as increasing access to basic services such as health, education and water and sanitation. A strong relationship between the goals of the WSC and the CRC quickly emerged in that pressure to implement the Convention also spurred governments to meet the goals.

For UNICEF, advocacy and promotion of the CRC meant ‘child protection’ and the complex of issues that go with it became more central to the organisation’s purpose than ever before. From 1995, the organisation made the transition to the new Millennium under the guidance of Executive Director Carol Bellamy with a strong policy of upholding every child’s right to health, education, equality and protection as enshrined in the CRC.

Unite for children

Two major events at the beginning of this century have shaped UNICEF’s future direction for children: the UN Millennium Summit, in September 2000 and the UN Special Session on Children (UNSSC) in 2002. Along with Section VI of the Millennium Declaration, the Summit produced a set of eight goals for 2015, all of which are child–focused in some way. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the outcome document of the Special Session, A World Fit for Children, committed world leaders to completing the agenda of the 1990 WSC. Significantly, the active role played by children in the UNSSC set a precedent for their participation which UNICEF has promoted ever since.

Education became a still more important item on the UNICEF agenda in 2000 when the organisation was given lead agency status in the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI). Setting up its own acceleration strategy, 25 by 2005, for the 25 countries most at risk of failing to achieve the MDG target of gender equality in primary education, UNICEF argued that investment in girls’ education would not only protect the right of all children to a quality education but that it was fundamental to achieving the other MDGs.

Towards 2015

UNICEF continues to work in partnership with governments, NGOs, the private sector, donors, children, their families and communities, supporting and encouraging programmes and initiatives that will contribute to the achievement of the MDGs by 2015, thereby making the world a better place for children. However success in this respect is not assured but depends more than ever before upon choices made by the international community and national governments.

Addressing the UNICEF Executive Board in 2007, Executive Director Ann Veneman affirmed that:

We will continue to underscore the importance of producing concrete and measurable results in our work, guided by the Millennium Development Goals and the Millennium Declaration. Children are at the heart of these goals.

As the organisation enters its seventh decade, the time has never been more appropriate for UNICEF and our partners to renew our commitment to building a world fit for children — and to ensure that it happens.

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