XUNICEF News and Views

Since the United States is celebrating its 250th Anniversary, it seems an appropriate moment to remember my good American experiences.

Greetings.   I am posting this today, because 81 years ago, on May 3, 1945, Hamburg surrendered and avoided total destruction. For us in northern Germany it was the beginning of peace.

Malcolm Kennedy interviewing Sir Edmond Hillary Kathmandu 1986 for the Bob Geldoff's SportAid event. I first met Malcolm Kennedy in Nairobi Kenya in 1976 when I was doing free-lance graphic design jobs for both UNICEF and UNEP. He was a distinguished, unpretentious New Zealander who was the UNICEF Representative in Somalia.

This one covers a brief but full digest of the time in 1992 that our beloved Executive Director, Jim Grant visited Bolivia to get a sense of our programme. I was in my fifth year as UNICEF Representative in La Paz. My report: Breakfast meetings at 6:00 AM, midnight meetings to compare the day's notes. Jim Grant visited Bolivia for 11 exhausting 18 hour days. Four meetings with President Jaime Paz Zamora (Jaime is Jim in Spanish); two in the field, one with the entire Cabinet of Ministers and one with Big Jim (Grant) and Little Jim (yours truly). He met separately with the Vice President, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Planning, Health and Education and Social Affairs (the latter was the President's Sister as First Lady). He addressed a joint session of Congress. We organized a day-long review of Child Survival and Development (CSDR) with about 100 participants including the V.P., other UN and multilateral agencies; donor Ambassadors; National and International NGOs; civil so...

This article is extracted from a presentation made by Niloufar Pourzand at University of Toronto’s Symposium on Women, Life and Liberty which was dedicated to Nobel Laureate Dr. Shirin Ebadi, 23 September 2023. Ms. Ebadi, the CRC and UNICEF Iran I want to briefly share with you a memory I have of collaborating with Ms. Ebadi in Iran – and thus recognize one of her many many contributions to the struggle for human rights in Iran – in this case the rights of children. At that time, in the early 1990s, I was a young/enthusiastic and passionate staff member of UNICEF Iran – the United Nations Children’s Fund. This is only one of the many chapters of Ms. Ebadi’s career as a human rights lawyer and activist. At that time, the CRC (Convention on the Rights of the Child) had just been ratified internationally – the first such document on children’s rights globally – and Iran had also ratified it. We in UNICEF Iran had the mandate to raise awareness on the CRC amongst the public/officials a...

  In the early1980s, I was the ESARO Desk Officer at HQs when Karl-Eric Knutsson was RD in Nairobi. He sent me to check out Uganda following the success by the Tanzanian army to overthrow Idi Amin. We were sitting on the tarmac of a bombed out military airport in northern Uganda. Scared, relieved, a feeling of delivery, salvation. We survived, but were shaken to our core. A voice: “Don’t move, mzungu”. I opened my eyes and looked into the business end of an Ak-47. A soldier held the other end. “Pole, pole, rafiki, I am not going anywhere.” The day started innocently enough. I was visiting UNICEF Uganda. It was Saturday. Missionaries had invited us to use their airplane to visit the north. It was right after the Tanzanian army had crossed the country, ridding it of Idi Amin. Much chaos followed. Refugees, people scattered and in makeshift camps. Severe fighting going on in many areas. Two Air France pilots on layover volunteered to fly us. The plane was a single engine. A four-seate...

  James Reddell in his The Celestine Prophecy writes about meaningful coincidences and that anyone who crosses our path has a message. Many have experienced chance encounters that have stayed as treasured memories. This story is about my serendipitous connection with Ethel Grant, who passed away in Agra, India in April 1988. While working in UNICEF New Delhi, sometime in 1986, David Haxton asked me if I would accompany a visiting group of around 20 US Committee members on their field trip in India.  I agreed immediately. While it was a privilege, it was a daunting challenge. The field trip was partly programme related with tourism and covered, I think five or six locations besides Delhi. In preparation, I met with Section Chiefs for briefings and was reassured by Bill Cousins that I knew enough and more about Indian culture, the social and economic situation which is what the visitors would want to know about. SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) centre for “ chikan” women...

  In Vietnam ethnic minority children had significantly worse social economic indictors compared to the majority Kinh (or Viet) ethnicity [1] . Clearly UNICEF programming needed to prioritise attention to them. Central Highlands Several months after my arrival in Vietnam I made a trip to the Central Highlands. The ethnic minorities of the Central Highlands were collectively termed ‘Montagnards’ by the French colonialists and later by the Americans during the Vietnam War. The Montagnards had a history of resistance to Kinh (Viet) attempts to control the Central Highlands. They were strong allies of the USA during the ‘American War’. After the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, the Government encouraged Kinh settlement in the Central Highlands and the Montagnards were by now definitely subjugated by the Kinh (Viet) dominant regime. Nevertheless, the Government official policy was to treat ethnic minority development benevolently. Mothers bringing their children for immunization, ...

Working for UNICEF changed my life in many ways. It gave me opportunities that I never thought I would get, including to contribute to the improvement of the world’s children in ways that I had never envisioned. It also gave me the opportunity to travel to a large number of countries. I saw a lot of positive developments, but I also witnessed terrible situations for children. During my nineteen-plus years with UNICEF, I traveled to around 120 countries, many of them a number of times. I will share some memories from an early travel to Africa which took me to Mali in 1987. Mali was at that time recovering from an emergency situation caused by a long drought and had one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. After having spent one night in the capital Bamako, I went to Timbuktu. For me, Timbuktu had always been something mythical and a very far away place. ©Quora From the material I had received, I learned that Timbuktu had become a permanent settlement in the twelfth centur...

I was in my fourth year with the Italian Medical Team in Zanzibar and Pemba Islands where we were assisting the Government to run an EPI programme and provide medical staff for the hospital work, when I received a phone call from the Italian Embassy in Dar es Salaam.  -Doctor, the newly appointed Italian ambassador comes tomorrow to Zanzibar to meet with His Excellency, Vice President Ali Hassan Mwinyi. Please go to the airport to meet the Ambassador. - But … I started  - Doctor Murzi, there is no but. The Ambassador is looking to meet you, good bye, and my interlocutor closed the call.  The following day early in the morning, I was at the airport.  - Doctor Murzi, thank you for coming. Let us go and have breakfast together and you will brief me on the road and during breakfast.  So we did.  The Ambassador was extremely kind, had plenty of questions, from health to the economy to social issues.  At the end of the one hour breakfast, I thought my task w...

  Shortly after my arrival in Congo in late 2005, I took the plane from the capital Kinshasa to the city of Goma over 1,000 miles away on the eastern edge of the country. Flying over the vast Congo rain forest I gazed out of the window onto what looked like an endless carpet of broccoli. Landing in Goma, the plane stopped just short of a wall of lava that had flowed across the runway a few years before when Mount Nyiragongo volcano had last erupted. Johannes Wedenig, Chief UNICEF East DRC, was awaiting my arrival. He had suggested we make an assessment of the recently pacified Fizi Territory of South Kivu Province. Next stop was the city of Bukavu, a few hours by speedboat down beautiful Lake Kivu. This is one of a chain of lakes running north to south along the western rift valley system. After a night at the Orchid Hotel in Bukavu, UNICEF local head of office Matteo Frantini picked us up in a Toyota Landcruiser and we headed south.  After a journey along twisting mountain ro...