When I recall, as I often do, my time at UNICEF (the best professional days of my life), I don't think first about policies, programs or resources. I remember people.
Our UNICEF colleagues, international and national, of course. (More about them later.) We shared so much hard work and I still share, with many, such strong friendships. And my colleagues in other agencies, like Margaret Chan, who (with my amused permission) always called me “her sister”, even in front of puzzled public audiences.
But first of all, I remember the children. Children whose courage and laughter, sometimes in terrible circumstances, were always so infectious. I was always reminded of this by the look on Audrey Hepburn’s face in the very large photograph I kept outside my office. You could see the smiles of the children surrounding her reflected in her own evident, beautiful joy. (I attach a similar photo of her, and one of Danny Kaye, to illustrate the point.)
I recall children like Saja in Aleppo, who lost her leg in an explosion but could still smile as she was filmed pivoting on her crutches to kick a soccer ball back up and over her head.
Nguyen Thi Phuong Anh, a Vietnamese girl living with brittle bone disease, whom I met in Danang. She sang for us, in her lovely voice, at a disability event in New York. I saw her again more recently when she sang at Carnegie Hall with a chorus from Australia, where she was studying.
Marwan, a young Syrian refugee in a classroom in the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon, who was asked by the other students to read his beautiful poem of longing for his beloved home across the border.
Boys in a village in Chad; in Homs, Syria; in a cholera treatment tent in Haiti Рall smiling when I pointed to the UNICEF logo on their Bar̤a shirts.
The boy who showed me a painting he had made of his abandoned village outside Goma. Another who had drawn the image of his drowning family trapped in their home as he alone was swept to safety in the tsunami at Tacloban. Or perhaps most gripping, the drawings by a young Rohingya refugee of his schoolmates being shot by soldiers in his schoolyard. They all, after speaking awhile, could still smile. Even while I could barely do so.
I hope the child whose single shoe I found in a destroyed and abandoned village in the Central African Republic is now able to smile, somewhere, in safety.
Happier are the memories of children laughing at me while I clumsily tried to dance with them on a playground in southwest China or run bases on a girls’ softball field above a village mostly destroyed, weeks before, by the tsunami in Japan. Or recollections of the girls in Nepal and Bangladesh, former victims of abuse or trafficking, who could laugh at dumb jokes at the centers where we supported their rehabilitation.
All such children deserve our support. Indeed, all children do. Because all children have rights - and the greater their deprivations of all kinds, the more those rights are being violated. The more they need UNICEF.
And they deserve our support because, quite simply, they are children.
Which brings me to our UNICEF colleagues who worked, and work, so hard and well for them. As we reminded ourselves - the “results” we worked for were not simply abstract statistics. They measured improvements in children's lives.
I recall not only our colleagues’ hard work, but more, how highly skilled they were. I remember how impressed I was, in 2010, by our analysts who, over some weeks of modeling, showed that promoting “equity” and focusing on the children most in need was, and is, not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing, as well. Because, as we showed in The Lancet, the impact in terms of the lives saved and improved in the most deprived areas is greater than the additional costs of reaching them. (Data collected years later seemed to confirm this.)
The study buttressed our efforts to extend our reach into these areas and develop new ways of measuring our impact there. And often helped deepen the commitment of host governments, partners and donors to a focus on equity.
It was the skill and passion of our staff that also helped UNICEF (with the World Bank) lead the way on promoting attention to vital but under attended issues like Early Childhood Development. New science showed the horrifying, lifelong impact not only of improper nutrition but also of violence or a lack of stimulation on the developing brains of very young children. Supply Division, with the Gates Foundation, was remarkable in using our market leverage to reduce the prices of vaccines before we purchased and distributed them. The fascinating work of our Innovation Unit, some of which I sometimes understood, was of great value not only to our programs but to others, as well.
Above all, our colleagues’ amazing work on the ground, everywhere and especially in humanitarian crises, made and makes UNICEF one of the first places to which others turn for help and partnerships in emergencies. I was always moved by the determination and morale not only of our international staff in such crises, but in at least equal measure by the national staff who carried on with such professionalism as they saw their fellow citizens suffer so much.
(There were times when we had to strongly disagree with our donors as we defended our humanitarian work in areas under the control of politically unpalatable parties. But it was necessary to do so. UNICEF is and must remain non-political, even with regard to Security Council political decisions in civil wars. And the children in those areas, or indeed anywhere, should never be forgotten victims of adult politics.)
Our colleagues’ high competence and courage meant that it took no particular skill by our colleagues to help increase our resources (although they were indeed very good at it, as we almost doubled our budgets over those years). Donors and partners looked to us because they knew we could deliver, often together with our partners in WFP, UNHCR and other agencies on the ground.
For example, the World Bank approached us, early in the 2013/14 Ebola crisis, with an offer (gladly accepted) to lead in developing Community Care Centres in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. (Similarly, the Bank asked us to manage a large-scale, local cash transfer program in Yemen - which our UNICEF colleagues carried out in brilliant fashion.
In short, success in fundraising rests less on “fundraising” skills, important as they are, than on delivering results. After all, development ministries in donor countries need to justify their own budgets by showing results to their parliaments - whose members need, in turn, to make a similar case to their constituents.
So I remember our UNICEF colleagues not only with great affection, but also deep admiration - especially those heroes serving far into the field.
And in all cases, those who worked the best, did so by working together.
I used to ask, in meetings with staff in country offices as well as in New York, if any one of them believed her or his work was less than essential to the work of all the others. Understandably, no one ever volunteered. Thus, I would say - as I inwardly heard Aretha Franklin singing along - that each one of us, whatever our title, is worthy of equal R - E - S - P -E - C - T.
Our UNICEF colleagues stand out, like our colleagues in local and international NGOs as well as in sister agencies such as WFP and UNHCR, because their primary ambition is to do things for the kids, not merely to be something for themselves.
That is why they cherish their work at UNICEF. “For the Children.”
Note: Anthony Lake was UNICEF's 6th Executive Director and served from 2010 to 2017. Prior to joining UNICEF he served as the US National Security Advisor from 1993 to 1997, and as US Special Envoy on the Ethiopia / Eritrea conflict and Haiti. He once was the Director of The International Voluntary Services and also served on the Board of Jim Grant’s Overseas Development Council. More recently he was on the Board of the US Committee for UNICEF for 9 years, including as Chairman from 2004 to 2007. From 1997 and until he joined UNICEF he was Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Harvard College and received his PhD from Princeton University.
Our UNICEF colleagues, international and national, of course. (More about them later.) We shared so much hard work and I still share, with many, such strong friendships. And my colleagues in other agencies, like Margaret Chan, who (with my amused permission) always called me “her sister”, even in front of puzzled public audiences.
But first of all, I remember the children. Children whose courage and laughter, sometimes in terrible circumstances, were always so infectious. I was always reminded of this by the look on Audrey Hepburn’s face in the very large photograph I kept outside my office. You could see the smiles of the children surrounding her reflected in her own evident, beautiful joy. (I attach a similar photo of her, and one of Danny Kaye, to illustrate the point.)
I recall children like Saja in Aleppo, who lost her leg in an explosion but could still smile as she was filmed pivoting on her crutches to kick a soccer ball back up and over her head.
Nguyen Thi Phuong Anh, a Vietnamese girl living with brittle bone disease, whom I met in Danang. She sang for us, in her lovely voice, at a disability event in New York. I saw her again more recently when she sang at Carnegie Hall with a chorus from Australia, where she was studying.
Marwan, a young Syrian refugee in a classroom in the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon, who was asked by the other students to read his beautiful poem of longing for his beloved home across the border.
Boys in a village in Chad; in Homs, Syria; in a cholera treatment tent in Haiti Рall smiling when I pointed to the UNICEF logo on their Bar̤a shirts.
The boy who showed me a painting he had made of his abandoned village outside Goma. Another who had drawn the image of his drowning family trapped in their home as he alone was swept to safety in the tsunami at Tacloban. Or perhaps most gripping, the drawings by a young Rohingya refugee of his schoolmates being shot by soldiers in his schoolyard. They all, after speaking awhile, could still smile. Even while I could barely do so.
I hope the child whose single shoe I found in a destroyed and abandoned village in the Central African Republic is now able to smile, somewhere, in safety.
Happier are the memories of children laughing at me while I clumsily tried to dance with them on a playground in southwest China or run bases on a girls’ softball field above a village mostly destroyed, weeks before, by the tsunami in Japan. Or recollections of the girls in Nepal and Bangladesh, former victims of abuse or trafficking, who could laugh at dumb jokes at the centers where we supported their rehabilitation.
All such children deserve our support. Indeed, all children do. Because all children have rights - and the greater their deprivations of all kinds, the more those rights are being violated. The more they need UNICEF.
And they deserve our support because, quite simply, they are children.
Which brings me to our UNICEF colleagues who worked, and work, so hard and well for them. As we reminded ourselves - the “results” we worked for were not simply abstract statistics. They measured improvements in children's lives.
I recall not only our colleagues’ hard work, but more, how highly skilled they were. I remember how impressed I was, in 2010, by our analysts who, over some weeks of modeling, showed that promoting “equity” and focusing on the children most in need was, and is, not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing, as well. Because, as we showed in The Lancet, the impact in terms of the lives saved and improved in the most deprived areas is greater than the additional costs of reaching them. (Data collected years later seemed to confirm this.)
The study buttressed our efforts to extend our reach into these areas and develop new ways of measuring our impact there. And often helped deepen the commitment of host governments, partners and donors to a focus on equity.
It was the skill and passion of our staff that also helped UNICEF (with the World Bank) lead the way on promoting attention to vital but under attended issues like Early Childhood Development. New science showed the horrifying, lifelong impact not only of improper nutrition but also of violence or a lack of stimulation on the developing brains of very young children. Supply Division, with the Gates Foundation, was remarkable in using our market leverage to reduce the prices of vaccines before we purchased and distributed them. The fascinating work of our Innovation Unit, some of which I sometimes understood, was of great value not only to our programs but to others, as well.
Above all, our colleagues’ amazing work on the ground, everywhere and especially in humanitarian crises, made and makes UNICEF one of the first places to which others turn for help and partnerships in emergencies. I was always moved by the determination and morale not only of our international staff in such crises, but in at least equal measure by the national staff who carried on with such professionalism as they saw their fellow citizens suffer so much.
(There were times when we had to strongly disagree with our donors as we defended our humanitarian work in areas under the control of politically unpalatable parties. But it was necessary to do so. UNICEF is and must remain non-political, even with regard to Security Council political decisions in civil wars. And the children in those areas, or indeed anywhere, should never be forgotten victims of adult politics.)
Our colleagues’ high competence and courage meant that it took no particular skill by our colleagues to help increase our resources (although they were indeed very good at it, as we almost doubled our budgets over those years). Donors and partners looked to us because they knew we could deliver, often together with our partners in WFP, UNHCR and other agencies on the ground.
For example, the World Bank approached us, early in the 2013/14 Ebola crisis, with an offer (gladly accepted) to lead in developing Community Care Centres in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. (Similarly, the Bank asked us to manage a large-scale, local cash transfer program in Yemen - which our UNICEF colleagues carried out in brilliant fashion.
In short, success in fundraising rests less on “fundraising” skills, important as they are, than on delivering results. After all, development ministries in donor countries need to justify their own budgets by showing results to their parliaments - whose members need, in turn, to make a similar case to their constituents.
So I remember our UNICEF colleagues not only with great affection, but also deep admiration - especially those heroes serving far into the field.
And in all cases, those who worked the best, did so by working together.
I used to ask, in meetings with staff in country offices as well as in New York, if any one of them believed her or his work was less than essential to the work of all the others. Understandably, no one ever volunteered. Thus, I would say - as I inwardly heard Aretha Franklin singing along - that each one of us, whatever our title, is worthy of equal R - E - S - P -E - C - T.
Our UNICEF colleagues stand out, like our colleagues in local and international NGOs as well as in sister agencies such as WFP and UNHCR, because their primary ambition is to do things for the kids, not merely to be something for themselves.
That is why they cherish their work at UNICEF. “For the Children.”
Note: Anthony Lake was UNICEF's 6th Executive Director and served from 2010 to 2017. Prior to joining UNICEF he served as the US National Security Advisor from 1993 to 1997, and as US Special Envoy on the Ethiopia / Eritrea conflict and Haiti. He once was the Director of The International Voluntary Services and also served on the Board of Jim Grant’s Overseas Development Council. More recently he was on the Board of the US Committee for UNICEF for 9 years, including as Chairman from 2004 to 2007. From 1997 and until he joined UNICEF he was Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Harvard College and received his PhD from Princeton University.
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