The recent discussion surrounding UNICEF’s ‘investment’ in Cryptocurrency and NFTs has left some of us feeling that it’s probably all about smoke and mirrors with a little snake-oil thrown in for good measure. They seem not to be regulated by anyone and while a few people claim to have made substantial sums from them, one hears little about those who have lost money on them. I wonder what position the UNICEF Board has taken on this matter and who will be responsible for any loses that are faced as a consequence of this ‘investment’ ?
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1. Whatever currency UNICEF is donated, it needs to be convertible
Have you ever been in a situation where events take over and drive your project(s) in directions never imagined when making agreements with the Planning Commission ?When running a very large programme which required substantial supply elements, it was sometimes necessary to use currency reserves to purchase supplies from the country/countries that made the original contribution(s) particularly if that currency was not convertible. Sounds convoluted ? Consider it this way – Russia in the early 1980s donated roubles to UNICEF as a goodwill gesture. This led to the problem of what to purchase with those roubles because few countries – other than Russia itself - would accept payment for goods in roubles. Put differently, UNIPAC wished to utilise a large rouble surplus but found that very few items that UNICEF country programmes required were up to the requisite minimum quality standard except for aspirin, ordinary Portland cement and barbed wire.
UNICEF, Bangladesh, required considerable quantities of OPC (ordinary Portland cement) for the construction of water supply tap-stands (for 50,000 hand-tubewells per year) and for 150,000 squatting plates for latrines per year. From memory, this equated to around 100,000 pockets of cement for a full year’s supply.
Normally, the procurement process was handled by UNIPAC and the purchases of cement might have resulted in three or four deliveries over the year, but in one year, I was given less than 10 days’ noticed of the impending arrival of 100,000 bags of cement to Chittangong. The DPHE (Dept of Public Health Engineering) godowns (warehouses) in Chittagong could barely store half of that at such short notice, so it was necessary to arrange lighters to take the remaining 50,000 bags to Khulna since ocean-going cargo vessels had far too deep a draught to navigate the river system. As one can imagine, it was panic stations for a couple of weeks.
Bulk deliveries of cement are handled in many countries by road tanker, but the Russian cement came in 6-ply paper bags which had the habit of splitting if roughly handled. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, a small amount of wastage was allowed to account for this type of spillage. Because of the suddenness of the arrival of the cement and the fact that it was impossible to limit the spillage to near zero, a notional 3% was allowed for losses.
This 3% would seem to be rather high for such a commodity, but in reality, nothing was lost. Where something as precious as cement is concerned, every gram spilled is swept up and re-bagged and sold on. Quite who benefitted from the sale of the ‘lost’ cement is unknown, but UNICEF was not asked to pay anything over and above the supply of the cement. At least we didn’t have to take barbed wire to utilise the rouble surplus. . . . .
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2. The logistics of distribution of 50,000 handpumps into the Bangladesh rural sector per year, with all the ancillary equipment, was quite complex.
It included a fleet of trucks, cars, motorcycles and boats to move supplies to where they were needed, and DPHE was always competing with other government agencies for the budget to maintain this equipment. UNICEF provided the capital cost and undertook the procurement, but very rarely provided for any recurrent expenses.I digress to note that we had one expatriate Senior Programme Officer (SPO) who was a linguist. He arrived in Bangladesh speaking English (mother tongue), Bahasa and Cantonese (both completely fluently) and he was able to make the UNICEF submission to the Bangladesh Planning Commission in Bangla just one year after his arrival. He received a standing ovation for this, but he put it to good use:
I had discussed the matter of keeping the DPHE UNICEF-supplied-vehicles operational with the SPO who said that he would look into the matter.
About a week later, he took me on one side and asked what I knew about Bogra mangoes ? “Delicious”, I said. He agreed and then said that he’d had a long chat with one of the DPHE truck drivers to find out how he managed to keep his truck on the road while some others just abandoned theirs. It all boiled down to the Mango-run where the driver would make an occasional delivery of mangoes from Bogra to Dhaka and use the profit to undertake necessary repairs and maintenance to his truck so he could make another mango-run for profit. Without this ‘budget’, the DPHE trucks would not function at all. I was asked please to look the other way when a UNICEF-supplied DPHE truck came rolling past loaded high with mangoes as this was the only way in which – at that time – the trucks could be kept on the roads to carry all the WASH supplies for DPHE. Illegal ? Certainly, but in the interests of providing water supply equipment to keep children healthy, very effective. I looked the other way even though I was tempted to stop the truck and ask for one of the mangoes as they were so good. . . . . .
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3. Women and child centred projects were not the sole preserve of UNICEF
One of the most remarkable projects in Bangladesh in the late 1980s which UNICEF had had no hand in creating, was the Grameen Bank, started by Professor Md Yunus, a Professor of Economics at Chittagong University who believed that rural women were excluded from the banking sector unnecessarily. As so much has already been written about the project and about Professor Yunus himself which is available in the public sector, it is unnecessary to repeat it here.That being said, it should be noted that the impact on the lives of women and children from that project has been profound and continuing. Where women earn money in their own right, they tend to spend it on their children. In the Grameen Bank, where 97% to 98% of Grameen Bank loans were given to women, the repayment of loans was exceptional and at times around 98%, while loans made to men through commercial banks had eye-watering default rates making one wonder how the commercial banks were able to survive at all.
If according to Liza Minelli money can make the world go round, the best investment is in women - whose loans are repaid - ensuring that more women can be extended loans which we know benefit their children. Investment in men, in Bangladesh at that time, seemed to be a self-limiting exercise in futility.
Great stories, Ken. I would have loved to learn more about the logistics of moving so much cement and so many pumps. Mangoes and women definitely had a part of it.
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