That figure made me reflect.
Sweden has always been a generous contributor to UNICEF, as have all northern European countries. For a couple of years, Sweden, a country of only seven million people at the time, I believe, contributed more to UNICEF than the United States, a nation forty times its size. We accepted that money with enthusiasm, assuring ourselves that our remuneration was reasonable, not excessive, and that our privileges were justified.
Looking at my pension statement today, I don't believe that is true.
In Sweden today, only just over 80,000 people out of a population of 10 million earn SEK 100,000 a month. Only a handful receive that much as a pension. It was ordinary workers—cleaners, drivers, and plumbers—who financed the lives we enjoyed. They paid for the aid budgets. They paid for our salaries. They paid for our housing allowances, education grants, and now, our pensions. They funded lifestyles that none of them could even dream of.
They did not know that we belonged to one of the most privileged classes in the world. We enjoyed tax advantages and accumulated pensions unheard of elsewhere, yet we cultivated the image of selfless international civil servants.
Of course, UNICEF did some good; it would be absurd to deny that. The real question is whether that good justified the cost, and whether taxpayers ever received an honest account of how their money was spent. Did they get good value for their money?
Perhaps not. UNICEF may have been less obsessed with results than with appearances. Reports and indicators multiplied. Success stories were polished and amplified; failures were softened or buried. Protecting the reputation of the institution was prioritised.
Poor managers were transferred. Failed programs did not result in accountability. Scandals were managed; careers were protected. Every year brought new strategies and fresh declarations of success. Meanwhile, taxpayers were shown photographs of needy children and were led to believe that their money was flowing efficiently toward noble causes. Much of it was not. A large share disappeared into the machinery itself: salaries, consultants, travel, conferences, and headquarters operations.
What troubles me most is not the waste but the lack of transparency. We demanded trust while resisting scrutiny. We demanded generosity while concealing inefficiency. We occupied the moral high ground while operating under incentives that had little to do with morality.
The taxpayers deserved better. They deserved to know how much of their money never reached its intended beneficiaries. They deserved to know how frequently institutional interests trumped humanitarian ones. They deserved to know that behind the rhetoric of sacrifice stood a highly paid international elite living well on their dime. Had they known all that, the crisis UNICEF is now experiencing might have come earlier.
If I had never left Sweden—which remains one of the richest countries in the world despite recent setbacks and waves of crime and violence—I would have been unlikely to earn as much over my working life as I did with UNICEF. Even if I had, I would have had to pay half of it in tax, work ten years longer, and retire on a pension a third of the size of what I have now. If my work with UNICEF was this extraordinarily beneficial to me, it might also have been good for colleagues coming from less fortunate countries than mine.
Before congratulating ourselves on the good we have done, we should acknowledge the extraordinary benefits we received. Before celebrating our careers, we should ask whether our results justified our rewards. Before speaking proudly of our service, we should remember who paid for it.
Thomas can be contacted via thomas.ekvall9435@gmail.com
I recommend to everyone to check out their position in their country’s (or the world’s) ranking of income, by clicking here.
ReplyDeleteYou may not be a member of the billionaire club , but most likely among the top One Percent of the world’s population. I agree with Thomas that, in hindsight, something is not right about the aid business.
I checked my ranking based on the pension I stated above, and I am in the top 0.1% in Sweden and was at the same top 0.1% in Spain.
ReplyDeleteDear Thomas,
DeleteI largely agree with the concerns you have expressed and appreciate your willingness to reflect critically on the privileges and incentives associated with an international UN career. Your observations about transparency, accountability, and the gap between public perception and institutional reality deserve serious consideration.
That said, I am puzzled by one aspect of your reflection. Why did this realization come only after your retirement and receipt of your pension? As an international professional with the UN for several decades, you would have been fully aware that your salary, benefits, tax exemptions, allowances, and eventual pension were substantially more generous than what most government employees in Sweden—or indeed in many other countries—could ever hope to earn.
At the same time, it is worth clarifying that a UN pension is not simply a gratuitous benefit bestowed upon retirees. It is an earned entitlement, built over the course of a career through substantial contributions made by employees themselves, alongside employer contributions under the pension scheme. The size of the pension therefore reflects not only the generosity of the system but also years of accumulated service and mandatory contributions.
Even so, the pension may have brought the disparity into sharper focus, but the underlying compensation structure was not new. In that sense, your sense of unease seems somewhat delayed. It naturally raises the question of whether these concerns should have been voiced earlier, while still in service and in a position to advocate for greater transparency and reform.
Nevertheless, it is commendable that you are raising these issues publicly now. Honest introspection from those who have worked within the system can contribute meaningfully to a broader discussion about whether international organizations are delivering sufficient value to the taxpayers who ultimately finance them and to the vulnerable populations they are meant to serve.
Thank you for speaking the truth.
ReplyDeleteTrue that UN pensioners are privileged with the better exchange rate of local currencies against the US dollar in some countries. We live in India and we are well protected with our pensions and health insurance. Government pensions here are calibrated against the cost of living index and in most cases if you are 85 and over, your pension would be several times more than your last earned salary some 30 years ago - life expectancy has also impacted the pension scenario and now the pension policies are being reviewed.
ReplyDeleteComing back to our UN pensions, should we feel guilty and did we really deserve the pension? I have mixed feelings on this . For we did contribute towards the fund when we were working. Thomas, your thoughts made me think too and concluded that we are fortunate indeed.
My ten cents' worth. I do not feel guilty about receiving the pension. We contributed to the fund, and it was part of the package we accepted when we joined. What I struggle with is a different question: whether our salaries and benefits were justified in the first place. Many international staff cost the equivalent of USD 300,000–400,000 a year once salaries, allowances, education grants, travel and other benefits were included. Can any of us honestly say that we contributed that much value to the countries where we worked? I certainly cannot. This was not a view only expressed by critics of aid. NGO colleagues often pointed it out, and so did some government counterparts. A few were blunt enough to say so openly; others merely hinted at it. I do think we should be honest and ask ourselves if the impact we had justified the rewards we received.
DeleteWhen we discuss the generosity of UN pensions, we overlook the much larger issue of what international staff, working in country offices, actually cost. It was not just salaries, allowances, education grants, travel, and other benefits in the field. We should also include our share of the headquarters and regional office overheads in New York, Copenhagen, and elsewhere. Those costs existed to support field operations; they were part of the cost of employing us. Once all of that is taken into account, the total annual cost of an international UNICEF field worker was probably well in excess of half a million dollars. Can any of us honestly say that we generated that much value for the children and countries we served?
DeleteThank you both for such candid and thought-provoking reflections. It takes courage to move past the debates about pensions and confront our true cost-to-benefit ratio.
DeleteTo be honest, I do not know how one would calculate our total individual cost once overhead is factored in, nor do I know the formula to value our contribution. But I suspect the real situation is more complex than a balance sheet can capture.
How, for instance, do you put a dollar value on successful advocacy? How do you calculate the return on investment for moving children's rights higher on a national government's agenda?
That said, we cannot ignore the core point. There must be a much better way to help poor nations catch up with the rest of the world than the model we have practised, often unsuccessfully, for the past 50 years.
If we "old UNICEF hands" could swallow our pride, openly admit where we have failed, and use our collective experience to help design a fundamentally different approach, that humility might just be the most valuable contribution we ever make. It could help make up for the mistakes of the past.
Sree asks whether we should feel guilty about our pensions. My answer is yes.
ReplyDeleteHad we, and the aid community more broadly, demonstrably helped Africa close the gap with the developed world, I might feel differently. But in country after country where we worked, the opposite happened. Many fell further behind relative to the rest of the world rather than catching up. I wrote earlier about Tanzania, where the data strongly confirm this. It was not difficult to see what was happening. Yet instead of confronting the evidence, we ignored it. We buried it.
Had Africa experienced a spectacular development success during our watch, I suspect we would have been quick to claim credit. We were not shy about taking credit for positive developments, even when others drove them. But we were less enthusiastic about accepting responsibility when things went wrong.
Something is troubling about the fact that virtually nobody in Sweden—the country that has contributed more per capita to UNICEF than any other nation—can expect a pension comparable to ours.
The reality is that many ordinary workers may have contributed, over a lifetime, sums equivalent to an entire year's net salary to various forms of aid. Some started working at fifteen, worked until sixty-seven, often in physically demanding jobs, and today struggle on pensions that are a small fraction of ours. Meanwhile, many of us worked half that length of time and spent much of our careers in comfortable air-conditioned offices.
This is not an argument against helping poor countries. It is an argument for intellectual honesty.
If highly educated professionals cannot recognise the ethical questions raised by such disparities, then something is wrong. We spent our careers speaking about equity, inclusion and social justice. Yet the "E" in DEI was not something we practised when it came to our own privileges.
Funny how reality has a way of reasserting itself. Aid budgets are shrinking, Sweden is winding down its assistance to Tanzania, and those supposedly "exorbitant" pensions are now getting taxed as well.
DeleteI imagine, Tom, that it gives you a warm sense of civic duty to contribute through Sweden's new tax on UN pensions.
I don’t feel guilty. Many of us did the best we could with the knowledge available to us at the time. It is unfortunate that the dominant narrative often suggests we were acting out of some grand commitment to the greater good of humanity. In reality, most of us were simply trying to earn a living and to do our jobs as professionally as possible. And the donors, many of whom sat on the Executive Board, had no better idea of whom to entrust with their money.
DeleteLater, as the signs became increasingly difficult to ignore, and especially with the benefit of hindsight, I grew disappointed that no serious debate about the effectiveness of aid was possible within an ever-expanding bureaucracy. Its primary raison d’être seemed to be the absorption of ever greater sums of money, with little demonstrable evidence of corresponding results. Instead of quietly reducing their contributions, donors should have encouraged debate and explained their growing lack of confidence in the aid industry.
This aside, and not that it matters, I doubt that Sweden contributed more – in absolute terms - to UNICEF than the USA.
If my memory is correct, there were years when Sweden was UNICEF’s largest contributor to General Resources. That distinction matters because General Resources are flexible, unlike the substantial earmarked funds many donors provide to advance their own political priorities. Sweden’s contribution was also remarkable when considered in relation to the size of its economy and population. If the discussion is about unrestricted support for UNICEF’s core mission, Sweden’s role was often exceptional and, at times, unmatched.
DeleteThe United States is typically described as UNICEF’s largest donor, but it is also a large economic beneficiary. Headquarters operations in New York, salaries paid to U.S.‑based staff, procurement contracts, consultants, conferences, travel, and other expenditures channel significant UNICEF‑related spending back into the American economy. In addition, the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund invests a large share of its assets in U.S. financial markets, generating further economic activity there. For these reasons—and depending on how economists assess the flows—the United States could be UNICEF’s largest overall economic beneficiary. My point is that donor rankings based solely on gross contributions tell only part of the story. Examining the full economic flows can produce a very different picture.
To me, it is a matter of individual perception, though the points made by Thomas and others certainly hold weight. It ultimately boils down to "haves vs. have-nots," luck, and how well one plays the cards they are dealt.
ReplyDeleteOn one hand, UN salaries, perks, and pensions can seem lavish. However, these are often balanced against the hardships of adapting to diverse cultures, difficult living conditions, and significant safety concerns. On the other hand, when compared to the private sector—where employees might enjoy superior living conditions, stable family lives, and substantial retirement portfolios through gratuities and private investments—the UN remuneration package may not seem like such an "unfair match." For instance, in my own country of residence, India and in the building apartment, there are multiple neighbours who draw far more salaries than me, investment income and live much flamboyant life than us. As for the National UN staff, the Cost of Living survey is always carried out comparing salaries/benefits of top ranking organizations.
It is also important to remember that our pension is not a gift; it is the result of years of significant monthly contributions from our own salaries, matched by the organization. This capital was built over decades, yet remains under threat due to downsizing and funding shortages. Had we stayed in our home countries and made similar deductions under national pension schemes, or consistently utilized Systematic Investment Plans (SIPs) and Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA), we might have built even larger portfolios capable of providing Systematic Withdrawal Plans (SWPs) comparable to our current pensions.
For those from Nordic countries, where accountability and minimal waste are cultural hallmarks, this pension structure might induce a sense of guilt compared to the "tied aid" models of other donor nations. However, if we view the pension as a disciplined investment of our own earnings rather than a windfall, that guilt may dissipate.
We must also acknowledge that, despite any personal reservations, we were part of a system that often engaged in "boisterous" expenditures—from retreats, meetings and conferences in five-star facilities to maintain a certain image, to business-class travel and high-value procurements ignoring"Value for Money". We witnessed cash grants to counterparts in environments where corruption was a known risk much more than World Bank accepted norm of "4-5%".
Ultimately, in today’s inflation-heavy world, the bottom line is to recognise our relative good fortune and enjoy this phase of life—or, in some cases, simply survive it.
Thomas has said what he has been feeling about pensions for many past years since his retirement. I think all of us would feel way better and less burdened if we could listen to how the recent cohorts of the humanitarian “sector” look at their package! Usually, it is about seasonal work and more money to have a contingency fund for those lean days when there is no work!!
ReplyDeleteOh, and perfect pathways have been created to avoid getting trapped in the additional earning limits while drawing full pension and working for the UN! I don’t know the mechanics of this so perhaps colleagues more familiar with this could help understand the motivations and mechanics
DeleteThis, in a nutshell, is why our anxious generation despises the boomers.
ReplyDeleteThanks Thomas for starting this interesting discussion. We all have opinions about pensions (which are presently under scrutiny), tax incentives by certain countries on UN pensions (which is changing rapidly in countries such as Spain and Portugal), consultancies for retirees in a shrinking UN workforce, etc. And we have our solutions. Retirement from UNICEF does not mean sitting on our laurels or our "riches". Several retirees look at retirement as a new lease of life and seek creative ways to continue to make a difference for children and others, some in their own country, others elsewhere. How many of us are active in academia, advisors to government on social and child policies, performing pro bono/voluntary work, sponsorships, mentoring, donations, etc. Our pensions allow us to continue to serve without seeking exorbitant fees or even pro bono - thus giving back to those in the community who are less fortunate. Most of these stories remain untold because of discretion et al. Maybe we should encourage our former colleagues to share their stories - even anonymously.
ReplyDeleteThomas, while your UN salary may have been taxfree your pension is not. Ccomparatively still very healthy after the Swedish Government shaved off about fifty percent. I suggest that you hedge your tax return.
ReplyDeleteAt the middle of my career my share of my 3 kids tuition was over 20,000 and my annual rent was 30,000 (just below tent subsidy) that meant the first 5+ months of my entire salary was for this only. We got home leave every other year - so if that was a year I paid then the 7th month and may half of 8th month was gone if I wanted my kids to see my their grandparents. Then there was high electricity bills, a good chunk to pay my share of heath costs after insurance and feeding my family - when all the smoke cleared I maybe took home 2 months salary if we lived modestly- not exactly a luxury life - but we were comfortable / but nowhere near what most EMBASSY , EU and - many of whom a had some hazard pay (this was Dar- not a hazard for UN but for some embassies they get mutilplevR&R trips home each year, snd paid no rent or utilities and had 100% of school fees paid . I do not call that a luxury standard? I am happy with my pension - but after taxes it is rather a modest sum . Maybe being a D1 was better?
ReplyDeleteThanks, Thomas, for bravely and honestly bringing up this topic of privileges that the UN staff enjoys. It is not a question of excessive privileges. These privileges are commensurate with current standards. It is true that UN staff sometimes work under hardship conditions. It is also true that if not for the UN, the World would not have made the progressive steps it has in areas of child health, education, child protection, etc. However, the question of whether the UN has made any serious attempt to assess its own performance to stay relevant remains. It's time to assess our own relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, coherence, sustainability and impact against the results we were to achieve. We need to even see if the UN has any planned results that it's accountable for, and a Theory of Change to achieve them. It is time for all of us, present and ex-staff, to pay serious attention to this. Are we doing too much of what the governments or INGOs should be doing, losing sight of our own responsibilities? Facing the issue honestly can turn the present dilemma into a great opportunity for the UN to be the leading world body to protect the peace and rights of the people. Surely there are enough capable people within the organisation to do it. The first steps may be difficult. Under proper leadership and genuine intentions, momentum will gather. Rambling but sincere thoughts from an octogenarian.
ReplyDeleteGood RBM thinking - beyond my rambling that our salaries - for some levels in some duty stations - are not so lucrative- we are long overdue to take a hard look as the UN on results . Relevance and value for money. The last 20 years of UN reform has been nothing short of a navel gazing debacle.
DeleteHaving recently started drawing my own UN pension, I can assure Thomas and others that my experience as a UN pensioner looks rather different from the one described here.
ReplyDeleteI worked for UNICEF for 18 years and, as others have noted, accepted the family disruption, security concerns and health risks that often accompany an international career. However, I never reached the level of a P5, let alone the D category.
Shortly after the pandemic, my post was abolished and I established a freelance consultancy supporting communications, partnerships and research teams with writing and editing services. Most of my clients have been within the UN system.
Last week I turned 62 and became eligible to draw my pension and with that, my earnings from UN consultancy work are now capped. I find this difficult to reconcile. After 18 years of service with UNICEF, I remain professionally active and continue to provide expertise that is in demand across the UN system. Yet, having earned a pension through years of service, I must now turn down work from the very institutions that continue to seek out that expertise.
That arrangement may make sense for retirees who completed long careers at senior levels and are already financially secure. My circumstances are different. I continue to support children in full-time study, consultancy work remains an important source of income, and the prospect of having to decline work that I am both willing and able to undertake is a source of real financial concern.
For me, the pension is not a symbol of privilege. It is an earned benefit that provides welcome security. At the same time, it introduces constraints that are rarely acknowledged in discussions about UN pensions.
Whether our salaries, privileges, and pensions were excessive is, of course, relative. To someone like me, measured against Swedish standards, they certainly were. Then again, Sweden has slipped several places in the GDP per capita rankings over the past decade and is experiencing a rise in crime and violence, so perhaps my benchmark is no longer valid.
ReplyDeleteTo an American, perhaps our salaries would seem modest. On the other hand, the average American civil servant appears to retire on a pension roughly half the size of ours—though AI might have miscalculated that particular statistic.
Comparisons with the private sector are irrelevant. Private-sector employees are generally expected to generate several times their cost in revenue and profit. How many among us could have achieved that is an interesting question. In any event, whether we were overpaid or underpaid should depend not on comparisons with others, but on what we actually accomplished. I do not know how to calculate that, but I suspect the answer might not be flattering.
The suggestion that we should continue doing good work in retirement to compensate for our generous remuneration is an intriguing one. However, I am not sure how that argument would sit with taxpayers. Judging by the growing number of countries now taxing UN pensions—perhaps in an attempt to recover what they regard as an overpayment—public enthusiasm may be limited.
The defense that we simply did our best with the knowledge available at the time, and that it was "just a job," is unconvincing. It was not just a job. We presented ourselves as people on a mission to improve the world; that was how we raised money. We appealed to taxpayers as humanitarians pursuing noble causes.
Nor is it true that alternative ideas were unavailable. There was abundant evidence of what worked. One only has to look at the Asian Tigers. If examples from Africa are preferred, Botswana and Mauritius come immediately to mind. The problem was not a lack of evidence; it was that development thinking within UNICEF was anchored in the academic theories of the late 1960s and 1970s, where figures like Julius Nyerere were treated as demigods.
Economic growth itself was viewed with suspicion and dismissed as capitalist thinking that resulted only in exploitation and poverty. Within UNICEF, several forceful personalities championed this worldview with absolute confidence and persistence. They turned out to be wrong, but that realization came too late, and only after decades of disappointing results.
The remnants of that ideology remain alive today. Hardly a week passes without my advocacy for a growth-centered development agenda being challenged. On occasion, I am even informed that my views are incompatible with UNICEF's values.
As for hardship, yes, some of us served in difficult environments—such as Uganda after the fall of Idi Amin, Ethiopia during the Red Terror, or Iraq during successive wars. Those postings were occasionally dangerous, but they were the exception. The vast majority of international staff spent their careers at headquarters or in comfortable duty stations, residing in spacious homes, assisted by domestic staff, and enjoying benefits unimaginable to the taxpayers funding them.
When we defend our remuneration by saying it was the going rate, it is worth asking: the going rate for what, exactly?
ReplyDeleteA surgeon may have a going rate for removing an appendix. A plumber may have a going rate for replacing a faucet. A lawyer may have a going rate for preparing a tax return. In each case, there is a clearly defined service and a measurable outcome.
What was our going rate for?
It cannot have been a universal market rate for a development worker. Development professionals performing very similar tasks were paid vastly different amounts depending on who employed them. A highly qualified NGO worker might accept a modest salary to pursue a cause they believe in. A consultant working for the World Bank, doing much the same work, might earn several times as much.
"The going rate", therefore, explains very little. It merely describes what a particular organisation chose to pay. It does not tell us whether that remuneration was justified, reasonable, or excessive.
If we want to defend our salaries and pensions, we need a much stronger argument than that.
Over the past decade, Western governments have subjected both aid and migration policy to extraordinary ideological swings. Around 2012–2016, aid budgets expanded rapidly while migration policies became increasingly permissive. The results seem to have surprised politicians, even if research shows that the immediate effect of aid is often increased migration. People get the means to move. Meanwhile, uncontrolled migration fuelled social tensions, political backlash, and the rise of far-right parties. Today, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Aid budgets are being cut, borders fortified, deportations expanded, and increasingly harsh measures introduced. Poor countries were expected to navigate these abrupt reversals while planning their development. Sensible aid and controlled migration can benefit everyone. Ideological experiments don't.
ReplyDeleteThis one is cutting too close to the bone. Why don't we just keep quiet, say a prayer for our good luck and enjoy our loot?
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteFor more than half a century, Swedish taxpayers financed one of the world's most ambitious aid programmes. Sweden was the first country to reach the UN target of devoting 0.7 per cent of national income to aid, and for many years spent well above 1 per cent. Many of us built our careers on that generosity.
What should I say, having returned to Sweden, to the retired labourer who may have contributed the equivalent of $30,000 to aid during his working life and now struggles on a small pension?
The man who spent forty years laying asphalt in the rain, working shifts in a factory, or standing on construction sites in freezing temperatures. The woman who cleaned offices before dawn or cared for the elderly for wages that barely stretched to the end of the month. Year after year, they paid high taxes and were told that their sacrifices would help lift poorer nations out of poverty. Yet in Africa, where most of their money went, many countries became relatively poorer rather than richer.
Had only a fraction of those hundreds of billions in aid been invested instead in a pension fund for Swedish labourers, the people who financed this grand experiment could have retired with dignity. And many respected economists would argue that Africa might not have been any worse off; some say it would have been better off.
Before we rush to defend our salaries and pensions, perhaps a little humility is in order. The people who financed our careers were not wealthy. They were ordinary workers who trusted us to use their money wisely. Looking at the results after sixty years, did we?
If the answer is yes, we owe them a better explanation than the one Africa itself provides.
Give it a rest, Thomas. You're paying half your pension back to Sweden in taxes anyway, so surely that should take some of the guilt away.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Anonymous.
DeleteOf course, the better-off should pay their fair share in tax, as I am sure all the humanitarians on this blog would agree. While the 50 per cent tax I now pay in Sweden on my UN pension may make a small contribution to the treasury, it has done little to relieve my sense of guilt.
After all, we presented ourselves as development workers, yet somehow failed to notice that many of the African countries where we worked were not developing. We were not prudent with other people's money, nor were we transparent about how it was spent. Our performance may not have been quite as impressive as our self-image.
At first, I feared the righteous judgment of Swedish taxpayers. Then I remembered the priest at my father's funeral. He asked what I did for a living, and when I told him, he showed respect and admiration. The aura we built is resilient.
I have also noticed that otherwise well-informed Swedes know surprisingly little about what actually becomes of their aid money. And there is further comfort. The left-of-centre parties, who may well return to power after the November elections, are critical of aid cuts and of the current government's decision to stop aid to Tanzania, which enjoys something of a protected status among the left.
So perhaps there is no immediate danger. Given that I am no longer young, and that four years is a long time, I may well escape reckoning altogether.
The Economist has an interesting article, "Grey Expectations", in its May 30 issue. Although focused on Europe, it may have some relevance to our development world.
ReplyDeleteThe magazine observes that, "If the European welfare states look like a pyramid scheme, its pharaohs are the baby boomers." In a broad sense, that would be us. It continues: "The bumper generation born in the two decades after 1945 would like to go down in history as the first generation in centuries who did not start a war, pitting one part of the continent against another. But economists will judge them less kindly. Boomers granted themselves generous pensions... The cost turned Europe lethargic... they will pass on a continent in need of repair."
If Europe is handed over in need of repair, what about the aid industry? Are we leaving behind a model that is in need of extensive renovation? Naturally, we prefer a more flattering narrative. We expanded rights and tried to make the world a better place. We also happened to secure extraordinary pensions for ourselves along the way. The next generation will pass their own judgment, and they will also inherit the bill.
UNICEF staff often defend their generous benefits because the organisation needs to attract the best talent. Given the compensation package, one might assume that the system went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that happened.
ReplyDeleteThat assumption deserves examination.
When UNICEF expanded across newly independent Africa, many of its early recruits came from the administrations of the former colonial powers. In numerous cases, individuals simply moved from colonial offices into UNICEF offices. Was that the best talent or just the most conveniently available?
The political instability that followed independence created additional recruitment opportunities. Governments came and went, often through coups. When administrations fell, UNICEF frequently recruited from among those who found themselves unemployed.
As time passed, the pool of colonials was running out, but by then, there was plenty of national staff to recruit from. In principle, this was sensible. In practice, the process was often less than ideal. In the three countries where I served as Representative, government officials attempted to influence recruitment decisions.
The salary survey system created its own distortions. Local salaries were determined through surveys that could produce astonishing results. It was not uncommon for a position paying $800 per month to be revalued at $2,400 after a survey. The problem was that the recruitment had already taken place. The organisation had hired the best candidate that $800 could attract and was then obliged to retain that person at three times the salary.
The recruitment of international staff was often no better. Temporary appointments often became stepping stones to permanent international careers. Individuals were brought in on short-term contracts and quickly moved into professional posts. I was recruited that way myself in Addis Ababa.
We never discussed these shortcomings. Instead, we took refuge behind the importance of helping children. The emotional power of the mission often discouraged scrutiny of the institution itself. Criticism could be dismissed as cynicism.
Perhaps, now that we are comfortably retired, a little humility may be in order. Before congratulating ourselves on our achievements, we might reflect on whether the organisation we served was always as effective and as professionally managed as we liked to believe.
This is a very individual concept and perception. I don't feel guilty at all, but rather very privileged. I have dedicated a significant part of my life to UNICEF's goals, many times sacrificing my personal life — which I did very happily and satisfied, knowing that I gave my "granito de arena." Furthermore, I feel grateful to receive a higher-than-average pension in my country, since it gives me the opportunity to help close people in need locally
ReplyDeleteIf you are from a Spanish-speaking country and have worked as many years as I have, your pension income places you not just above average but among the top 0.1%. If you feel your contribution merits that position, then good for you. The argument that our extraordinary pensions can be justified because they allow us to give something back to our local communities is not persuasive. If a small part of a big privilege is returned in charity, it is like the old notion that a few crumbs from the rich man's table should be received with gratitude.
Delete