As development practitioners, we knew it all the time, didn’t we?
So where did UNICEF get it wrong, and when? Actually, a long time ago.
The Joke
Soon after I joined UNICEF in 1982, I repeatedly heard the adage that: WHO knows everything but does nothing; UNDP knows nothing and does nothing; UNICEF knows nothing but does everything.
We used to laugh heartily and felt proud being the mavericks. Good for you, if you can still laugh about this today, but not so good for the poor and marginalized. While there was little systematic proof that it made a difference to a country’s development trajectory, many UNICEF staff believed that we were doing valuable work. A respected colleague once referred to UNICEF as a faith-based organization. You may have trained as a doctor, an educator, a water engineer or a demographer, but when it came to bringing about real development, most of us were amateurs.
Humanitarian and development work
The difference between emergency aid and development work is fundamental.
(i) In emergencies and disasters, an organization will most directly provide basic services to the affected people. This can happen with the consent, in parallel or even against the wishes of government.
(ii) For a country to develop, to grow the economy and to better look after its own people, its government needs to put in place strong institutions, relevant systems and good policies. As long as well-meaning aid agencies meet some of people's basic needs, an indifferent government can carry on as before, without having to make difficult decisions about its own accountability, policies and budgets. It helps uncaring governments to stay in power and build up their secret services instead.
UNICEF was created as a relief organization, and dropping the ‘E’ (for emergency) from its title didn’t make it a development organization. You may argue that we have built institutions through training and capacity building programs and helped to draft policies. However, by far the most common complaints are that these institutions were not allocated adequate budgets by their governments or were not allowed to function properly, or that they disappeared as soon as UNICEF support stopped. Many national policies, strategies and plans were never implemented, which caused a lot of hand-wringing among UNICEF experts.
The Country Programme
In all fairness, the original construct of a country programme was good, 70 years ago. A government of a developing country would submit a Country Programme Document (CPD) describing what it wanted to do and how, and the Executive Board would approve funding for those government measures. UNICEF staff had no role other than helping national authorities with the planning work, and to monitor whether government did what it promised to do. As it were, the CPDs received from governments were of poor quality. The UNICEF doctors and pedagogues and engineers were sent in to write into the plans what they wanted to do.
A treacherous conflation of the role of governments and the role of a development agency had begun. Was the CPD to describe what the government planned to do? Or did the CPD describe what smart UNICEF staff members would do if they had their say? We know how history played out. Today, a CPD describes what UNICEF will do and funding is allocated to the corresponding UNICEF office – not the host country. And because UNICEF has been substituting for or subsidizing services that governments ought to provide, they were rarely sustained. More about this can be found here.
As program guidance was consolidated, industrious UNICEF experts began developing theories and frameworks to help analyze the situation and its underlying causes and elucidate the anticipated effect of development activities. The most notable of these – the nutrition framework – is familiar to most of us. I maintain that the countless variations of causality analysis, logical and conceptual frameworks, problem trees, determinants, and other paraphernalia of results-based management are essentially the same. There is nothing wrong with any of them, and all serve the same purpose. They are meant to help ministers and officials better understand the situation of their most excluded citizens and what to do about it. Provided that ministers and officials really care. Which, according to the Nobel Prize winners, is not a given.
- what governments should do and
- the role of UNICEF to get national and local authorities to do what they need to do.
The much deplored lacking capacities of counterparts were not a solid point, nor was it the allegedly lacking expertise. Why would any official sweat over planning and managing a UNICEF pet project, if UNICEF provided enough people or money to do it for them? For more than two decades one can google for technical expertise and today you can ask ChatGPT to brief you over breakfast. What always mattered and still matters is the elusive political will – as corroborated by the 2024 Nobel Prize winners.
Human Rights
The adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) presented a significant opportunity to clarify the role of development agencies, but UNICEF and most UNDG agencies missed the boat. True to its historic original basic services approach, UNICEF’s emerging human rights approach to programming (HRBAP) stuck to the non-controversial strategy of building the capacities of claim-holders and duty-bearers, mostly training nurses to care and teachers to teach, and throwing in some supplies. Variations of HRBAP did exist but never gained much traction within UNICEF.
After many sleepless hours, I have to come to the conclusion that a right is a right if it can be enforced in court. Everything else is ambient noise. It requires the state to create and uphold the rule of law. This is not the case in countries, according to the Nobel prize winners, that struggle to make social and economic progress. It remains a mystery why UNICEF has not invested more seriously in legal expertise, the building of legal institutions and governance mechanisms. Apparently activists and lawyers rarely mix.
We all probably felt the futility of a needs-based approach and the need to challenge authorities. The UNICEF response to the adoption of the CRC did not take us far, and many of us knew it. After hours we talked about the indifference of governments and bad politics and the lack of political will. During daylight we and most of the other UN development agencies muddled through with our policy papers, guidelines and all the pomp and circumstance.
Do I know exactly what a human rights approach for UN agencies should look like? No, I don’t, but you and I may have some ideas. UNICEF and UNDG agencies wasted many decades, spending money on themselves and run-of-the mill training programmes, without ever challenging national and local authorities to do what is right. We never asked ourselves or had a serious discussion about how UNICEF could engage in the societal and political processes that may help improve governance in host countries.
Cui bono?
By avoiding controversy, UNICEF has been able to stay in business and generate enormous amounts of money. According to UNICEF’s own narratives, the Executive Board and the community of UNICEF employees and retirees, the UNICEF story is a story of unmitigated success. Who benefits most from it?
- UNICEF and UN civil servants receive among the highest public sector salaries and pensions in the world. If you want to keep it that way, you better not rock the boat.
- Under the traditional basic needs approach, low quality governments - those that do not care - receive the lion’s share of UNICEF funding. They are not going to change the way UNICEF operates.
- Donor country authorities take credit for financing a reputable organization without the headache of administering their own money. Questioning the authenticity of UNICEF or UN organizations is not in their interest.
Congratulations Detlef. The best piece you have written for this blog. I agree with everything you have said. Now the question is what do we do about it?
ReplyDeleteIf only the message got through...
ReplyDeleteIt is a hard message to get through. I have discussed these issues with several mainstream political parties in Sweden leading up to the last election two years ago and, in a nutshell, they are not particularly interested. Many politicians equate criticism of aid with racism. It is rather similar to criticising mass immigration. I recall a discussion with a Social Democratic focal point for aid just over two years ago. She told me aid was all about loyalty to the less fortunate in the world. When I pointed out that if one analysed Swedish aid to Africa over the past 60 years it was clearly more about loyalty to favoured political elites than to the poor, who have gotten relatively poorer over these years. She seemed unaware of this and was not pleased hearing it. Mainstream politicians don't want it to be known that they have spent close to a year's annual GDP on aid, over the past 60 - 70 years with little if anything to show for it. The enormous amount of aid to Nyrere's Tanzania did damage.
DeleteExcellent, Detlef!
ReplyDeleteExcellent Detlef! Your concluding points justify the continuation of the status quo and all parties are happy! Wonder if such issues were discussed in the recent Summit of the Future. Thanks for urging us to think.
DeleteWell, Sree, I don't know if you intended your comment on all parties being happy as a joke. Nevertheless, perhaps the taxpayers in the West who pay for it all and the kids in Africa who should have benefitted should be given a thought.
DeleteAmong the many stakeholders, the two that matter, the taxpayers in the West and the intended beneficiaries in Africa, have never had a say.
DeleteHad the taxpayers known how their money was spent funding would have dried up. Had the beneficiaries known how their money was spent they would have overthrown their governments and kicked out the aid agencies. It was therefore existential for the aid industry and recipient governments to keep these two stakeholders in the dark.
DeleteExcellent work, Detlef! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
ReplyDeleteI hope UNICEF considers revising its approach to programming in the upcoming strategic plan currently under discussion. The 2023-2026 SP is more of proposal than a PLAN. Beyond emergency situations (where I firmly believe that UNICEF continues to change lives of millions), UNICEF should reassess its engagement with governments in upper-middle and middle-income countries. In these contexts, UNICEF’s current focus on support training, capacity building, behavior change, and engagement of child does not add significant value. Instead, UNICEF should aim to influence institutional reforms with appropriate budget allocations. The operations in these countries should be very lean. Second priority should the strengthening of accountability mechanisms to hold government service providers to account. Lastly, UNICEF should truly move to the child rights monitoring functions in middle and upper- middle income countries especially where consistently UNICEF offices are adding lack of political will as reason for not achieving the results planned in the last couple of years.
The aid industry has spent hundreds of billions of dollars with few results and, in some cases, done harm. Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic for the umpteenth time will not fix this. A total rethink is called for. Would Africa have been better off without aid? That is quite possible
DeleteI am sure there is merit to what you are highlighting. However, during my close to 20 years in the development sector in countries in West Africa, Middle East and Asia, I can very clearly pick out developments influenced or catalyzed by UNICEF that changed millions of life for better. For sure, we can argue that we could have changed more life that what we did. But, I will find it hard to accept that those developments would have taken place without the UNICE stimuli.
DeleteDear Detlef, I certainly agree to some of your observations e. g. that governments were often not able or willing to do what they should do for their people and UNICEF experts took over their jobs without often understanding fully what the priorities of the people really were they tried to help. However, is your approach not too ambitious to get governments and experts to work for the benefit of the people hand in hand together? Looking from the sideline as I worked for UNICEF not in programs but in the private sector fundraising area, I saw projects which I admired very much and others I found questionable. But please, let us be aware that we are not living in a perfect world and will probably never be. Working together with local people opened up many new insights for me but also for the local staff. Yes, we worked together peacefully for a common goal coming from totally different backgrounds.
ReplyDeleteThat in itself, could already be considered a success in my view. Let us try to be a little bit more modest. The world deserves it.
With due respect, I find this write-up and comments unduly pessimistic and overly critical. This represents a "glass is half full" - or even worse - perspective. I prefer and genuinely believe in the "glass is half full" perspective. Yes, UNICEF and the UN are imperfect and may have committed many mistakes. But on balance, UNICEF's contribution to the wellbeing of children in the world has definitely been net positive. Or consider the counter-factual -- would the world have been better off without UNICEF/UN and international cooperation for development? There is plenty of literature supporting differing/contrary view points on this. We are all free to take our pick. I belong to the "glass is half full" camp.
ReplyDeleteIf I understand Detlef and the Nobel Prize winners correctly a country needs good governance to develop. However, almost all development aid, over the past 50 years, has gone to countries with bad governance. In other words, the possibility of success was never there. The question is why was this not understood by the aid industry? Now when it is, what should be done about it?
DeleteThe countries that received the most aid over the past 50 years are poorly governed and rather than the aid helping them develop they have fallen further behind the rest of the world. That seems to confirm the Nobel Prize winner's conclusions.
DeleteI take note of Kul's comments. But where are the comments of the other intellectual powerhouses, the high flyers, the development experts, the visionaries, the givers of passionate speeches and the writers of frameworks? Are they all in the "don't rock the boat" category?
ReplyDeleteAre there two categories of aid workers? Those who did not understand what Detlef and the Nobel Prize winners highlighted and those who did but did nothing about it.