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Neill McKee sent us his review of the book Persistence of Light  by John Hoyte, which also features Richard Jolly trekking across the Alps with an elephant.

Being in England for a week for my Cambridge college's 50th Anniversary reunion of my batch, I connected with Richard to go and see him in Lewes and pay my respects. Richard turned 90 on 30 June. He lives in a ground-floor flat in quaint Lewes with plenty of books surrounding him in his living room. He says he is very fortunate that one of his daughters lives in the flat next to his and another not far away. His last book "A Development Economist in the United Nations" published in 2023 is a memoir of his experiences over the 90 years with reflections on lessons learned.

Development and the power of ideas The book is available from Amazon.  and other book sellers McLeod Group blog by Lauchlan T. Munro, September 11, 2023 Is the UN just an ineffectual talking shop, incapable of meaningful action? Richard Jolly does not think so. In his short, insightful and easy-to-read autobiography-cum-UN history , Jolly shows that the UN has long been at the forefront of intellectual and practical innovation in international development, though this contribution is widely overlooked. And, he asserts forcefully, ideas do matter. Born into a middle-class English family, Jolly was sent as a child evacuee to Canada at the start of the Second World War. In 1945, he returned to the UK, read economics at Cambridge and, as a pacifist, declined to do his military service in the mid-1950s. For his refusal, he was sentenced by a London court to two years of work as a Community Development Officer in Kenya, then a British colony. There began his lifelong engagement with dev...

Bucking the system: the extraordinary story of how the SDGs came to be Richard Jolly will be 90 next year.Credit: Institute of Development Studies (IDS) A Development Economist in the United Nations: Reasons for Hope Richard Jolly Routledge (2022) Paula Caballero (right) and Patti Londoño led what they call a rogue operation to create the SDGs.Credit: Alamy Redefining Development: The Extraordinary Genesis of the Sustainable Development Goals Paula Caballero with Patti Londoño Lynne Rienner Publishers (2022) Click here for the original article Next week, world leaders will meet in New York City to assess progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There’s no varnishing it: the meeting will be a damp squib. Halfway to the SDGs’ 2030 deadline, none of the 17 goals to end poverty and protect the environment is on track, and only 15% of the 140 targets for which data are available look likely to be met. Progress towards the remaining 29 targets cannot be assessed....

Editor’s Note: The article is an excerpt from Chapter 10 of Sir Richard Jolly’s forthcoming book: Reasons for Hope The Impact of Recession on Children By 1982, when I joined UNICEF, the global economic situation for children had sharply deteriorated, often as the direct consequence of debt and structural adjustment policies. Little was known in detail about how children were being affected. I assembled a team of economists from inside and outside the organization to produce a report on “ The Impact of World Recession on Children. ” Giovanni Andrea Cornia, a highly creative UNICEF economist, always known to friends as Andrea, laid the foundations for the study. He identified a dozen developing countries, some rich, some poor, some with right-wing and some with left-wing governments, some with open, some with closed economies. Andrea’s skill produced a dozen countries within this matrix and we then commissioned a paper from an economist in each of these countries, asking them to documen...

Editor's Note: In 2006 Vanessa Redgrave and her son, Carlo Nero, produced the documentary, Wake Up World, in celebration of UNICEF's 60th Anniversary.   Now that we are celebrating our 75th Anniversary, it is a good moment to watch this important film again. You will recognize many familiar faces:  (in order of appearance) Richard Reid, Stephen Lewis, Richard Jolly, Ann Veneman, Kul Gautam, Jim Grant, Carol Bellamy, Kofi Annan, Kia Molly Okello, and several of UNICEF's Special Envoys.    Many thanks to Kul Gautam, Paloma Escudero, and Tanya Turkovich for recovering this important documentary from UNICEF's archives. On 7 December 2006 UNICEF's webpage carried the following article: "Vanessa Redgrave is widely considered one of the finest actors of her generation. She is equally well known as a passionate activist in the cause of children and an advocate of peace, tolerance and reconciliation. In June 1995, she was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. To ma...