Responding to the Comments on 'Rethinking UNICEF' : Detlef Palm

Editor's Note:  This refers to Detlef's earlier post, Rethinking UNICEF: Insights from outside the Bubble and the comments which appear below the article or by clicking here. 

Dear Colleagues,


Thank you to those who cared to comment. I got about three times as many private comments than comments that were shared with all.



Let me clarify that the paper was written for the internal UNICEF audience; but I agreed to it being shared with the XUNICEF network whose existence I hitherto did not know of. There has been no intent to damage our beloved UNICEF, on the contrary.



The thoughts are not a peer-reviewed research paper based on the hard labour of countless interns, watered down by the results of focus group discussion, endless PowerPoint presentations and retreats in some fine hotels. They are not the irrefutable truth, but meant to stimulate discussion. We in UNICEF have sometimes been over-sensitive to criticism, because we care.



We like to remember UNICEF 30 or more years ago, where things still worked as they were designed, where summits meant something, and nobody had smartphones. The paper is not a review of everything that UNICEF does; including the many good things that are still happening. But the world has changed – and mostly for the better.



With our many years of experience we all can contribute to a vision of how UNICEF can stay relevant; this is not less utopian as we did when we pulled the ORS sachet out of our suits, called the word leaders to embrace children rights, or threw ourselves between the warring parties to get children immunized.



Let’s discuss.