Pay day is weigh day: Ken Gibbs

by Ken Gibbs

All too often, UNICEF seems to ignore the needs of its own employees. National staff salaries in the early 1980s were a scandal and the children of UNICEF national staff often suffered as badly as children in the country which UNICEF was supposedly assisting. In Bangladesh, moves were made to illustrate to senior management in New York just how dire the position was. The United Nations then set about rectifying the situation and within one or two years, national staff salaries became reasonable. However, simply putting money into the pockets of staff members seemed to do little to ameliorate the condition of the children of UNICEF staff members.

One very creative national officer in charge of a sub-office in Bangladesh decided to bring the focus on to UNICEF children by introducing “Pay Day is Weigh Day”. All staff with children under the age of 5 were obliged to bring their children to the office to be weighed every time a monthly salary packet was handed over. No child, no salary. The intention was to ensure that these children were on a normal growth path and that if they weren’t, something was done immediately about it. All UNICEF children were obliged to have all vaccinations up-to-date. The results were startling from this simple change in emphasis. UNICEF kids benefitted and their parents were able to take these lessons into real programmes for children in the country at large.

In Quetta, after the starting flurry of adjustment, I felt it important to do much the same thing. Happily, we had just received a Junior Programme Officer, this time from Denmark, Helle Samuelsen. She was given two choices of programme area in which to become involved, and she opted to work in nutrition. In addition to her programme responsibilities, I gave her the job, with the senior national programme officer, Farida Nowsherwani, of looking at all the children of UNICEF, Quetta, staff who were under 5. We had, at that time, 21 of them.

The first crop of growth charts – all of which were displayed in the UNICEF, Quetta, library, showed that of the 21 children, 5 were either second or third degree malnourished. Now if this isn’t an indictment on child care UNICEF style, I don’t know what is. I was astonished and asked Farida and Helle to find out why this should be. It transpired that the malnourished children came from two families in one of which, the father had two wives and was busy spending all his money on building separate houses rather than devoting resources to the small children. He was told that unless this changed within three months, his job with UNICEF would cease. This seemed to concentrate the attention and after three months only one child was left on the slow growth path and none was second or third degree malnourished.

Later, photos of the children were pinned beside each of the growth charts and it became a badge of honour that each child was shown to be exactly where it should be on the growth path. Any drop off in weight was immediately noted and action taken. Isn’t this what the growth charts were all about ?

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