XUNICEF News and Views

By Shahida Azfar I was appointed Representative for Bangladesh in 1998. Despite being a Pakistani, I was set for a smooth sailing, because of UNICEF’s being held in great respect there for its work after Independence. All was well to start with, but soon the news broke out which sent shock waves not just in Bangladesh but all over the world. International newspapers initially broke the story that the ground water of Bangladesh was contaminated with Arsenic, a deadly poison, drinking of which had affected more than seventy million people. This came to light when several people showed signs of arsenic poisoning with cancers on their hands, feet etc. UNICEF was named as being responsible since it had installed million of handpumps to provide safe drinking water soon after independence. Ironically this was originally considered a big achievement as people, were drinking water from heavily polluted and contaminated ponds which had caused many serious waterborne diseases includ...

by Nuzhat Shahzadi On a sunny morning in 1996, I landed at the Jomo Kenyatta airport, Nairobi with my adolescent son. A very big man––an HR assistant from ESARO met us wearing even a bigger smile. That was the beginning of my real “African” journey. I had been to Africa several times on short-term assignments before joining ESARO. It was a different world out there in the 1990s . . . it was an impossible time of hopes and heartbreaks; war, reconciliation and peace . . . I was employed to spearhead a regional girl-child project in ESAR (1996-Feb 2000)––“the Sara Communication Initiative” with a focus on the protection, survival and empowerment of adolescent girls. HIV and AIDS were real threats along with the horrors of civil conflicts exacerbated by cultural practices that threatened health, emotional well being and rights of the girls. Among others, Uganda was one of my focus countries. I was invited by Kathleen Cravero, the Representative to support the country office. In my first mi...

  By Nuzhat Shahzadi I looked in horror and amusement at the print materials on my table. They  were intended to raise awareness against female genital cutting (FGC). They had been sent by various agencies and by my colleagues in ESAR. Most of the drawings showed a “witch” who seemed to be an old woman holding a shining large knife, gloating over her deed.  I had just joined ESARO as a Communication Officer and to head the regional Sara project (1996 - 2001). FGC was one of our key focuses. We hired an Eritrean consultant to assist with the research on FGC and roused up the country offices for support.   I decided to speak personally with girls who had gone through the process. We selected a girls’ school in Kajiado–48 miles from Nairobi. We started early in the morning. Wangari, our local research consultant accompanied me. She briefed me that 80-85% of the girls and teachers in that school had been circumcised. The headmistress was welcoming. Her name was Sophia. M...

by Ramesh Shrestha I arrived in Baghdad on the 29th of September 1997. I was briefed by the Representative, Philip Heffinck and the OIC in Erbil, Richard Prado. After four days, I was happy to join UNICEF Erbil. Following the first Gulf War, the office had been established in 1991 by Stewart McNab, who was my first supervisor in UNICEF Nepal. My first shock came enroute to Erbil, when the driver filled the tank of the Landcruiser. I was confused with what I saw. The driver paid the equivalent to 65 cents. Despite his ruthlessness, one of Saddam’s contributions to the public was to make fuel almost free. The story in the office went that drivers didn’t bother filling claims for reimbursement for fuel as it was not worth the paperwork! On to Kurdistan … After several hours of driving, we arrived at ‘no man’s land’ in Kirkuk, where the autonomous region of Kurdistan begins. I had to switch vehicles at the border crossing. Two Czech UN guards, more than two meters tall, welcomed me. It wa...

By Ken Gibbs UNICEF bureaucratic minutiae seem rarely to suit operations in war or conflict zones such as Iran, Iraq, Operation Lifeline Sudan, the Rwanda Genocide, Kosovo and Albania and the like. Being sent to Erbil in the Kurdish, Northern Governorates of Iraq in 1996, was one such. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the scramble by Europeans to divide the spoils into countries that bore little resemblance to the political, religious and ethnic realities on the ground, was a recipe for eternal strife. The Kurds occupy an invidious position sitting between Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon – and even as far away as Egypt – where they find themselves without a country that they can call their own, and worse still, they are seen as a threat to those countries in which they find themselves. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein and a cousin of his, Chemical Ali, targeted the Kurds especially from 1986-1988 implementing the Anfal which caused the total destruction of over 4,000 villages and between...

Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), 2002-2005 Bernt Aasen and Dr. John By Bernt Aasen Introduction OLS had started up in 1989 as a humanitarian program, based on a tripartite agreement between the UN, the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and Army (SPLA). It had a Southern Sector (SS) managed from Nairobi and Lokichogio in Kenya servicing areas controlled by SPLA and a Northern Sector (NS) run from Khartoum, which covered the north and towns in the south controlled by GoS. The Southern Sector was headed by the UNICEF OLS Chief who also was UN Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator for the South. With Amb. Vraalsen, UN Special Envoy, and Dr. John in his meeting room at New Site . By 2002, the Southern Sector was an oiled humanitarian aid machinery which included the UN, predominately UNICEF and WFP, and some 30 international NGOs with more than 600 staff in sub-offices and camps in SPLA controlled territories. No NGOs were involved in the NS and UN agenci...

By Colin Davis There are always occasions where UNICEF staff members have to use their skills at diplomacy with senior government officials. One such occasion was in Ethiopia in 1997. I had only just joined the programme there as WES Programme Chief when, at a high-level planning meeting the Government said that they didn’t want UNICEF in the country any more. Needless to say, we were all shocked and the future of UNICEF in Ethiopia seemed in doubt. A very senior delegation from UNICEF, New York came to discuss the next steps with us. I seem to remember that UNICEFs relation with government was so fragile this delegation stayed in-house to help us to think through the best course of action. The result was that three of us; myself, Kayode Oyegbite and Rama Ramachandran were delegated to meet with Government to find a way out of the situation. The three of us were quiet in thought as the car drove us up the long hill to planning ministry, for our first meeting. The whole office was rel...

By Colin Davis I can’t remember how many speeches I have delivered but it is part of the job, both prepared and extemporaneous. I never let myself get fazed by any occasion or size of audience. In the Philippines not long before I retired, the Child Protection section asked me to deliver a speech at a workshop which had been organised by the Asia Foundation. I don’t know why, but I didn’t pay much attention to the details, leaving it up to the programme specialists to tell me anything important. They gave me a speech, which I glanced over. The day came and we left for the event at the time the section told us. When we got there and walked into the large ballroom setting, I was horrified to find that we were late and the first speaker, a senior judge, was already delivering his speech! I was the next speaker and I was even more horrified to see who the dignitaries were: the head of Asia Foundation, the Vice President of the Philippines and next to him the American Ambassador. I wal...

by Lou Mendez Inter-Agency Secondment After multiple UNICEF postings, a minority of staff were asked to represent the mother organization on the battlefields of UN Reform. In my case, being seconded to the UN Secretariat and UNDG in 1998 proved to be an adventure out of the ordinary. Working at the Secretariat monolith is challenging. Pace is painfully slow… very slow like running mud. Results are always downplayed by others for fear of success or escaping peer criticism. A senior colleague told me that “it’s not the results, young man (I was 46 then!!), it’s the perception of the process”. I do remember one inter-divisional meeting of D2s, on how to facilitate a future One IT Centre for all UN agencies. Unfortunately, after the introductions, the discussions focussed more on one person’s equestrian abilities and noble lineage than the subject on hand. Given the current move of UNICEF IT to Valencia (Spain) joining the UN Secretariat and DPKO IT Divisions, it would probably have been ...

by Niloufar Pourzand One of my most fulfilling professional experiences was leading the largest UNICEF Field Office in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh (UP) India from 2013 to 2016. The State of UP is home to 240 million people. Like the rest of India, UP has witnessed significant progress in various fields. However, it is also affected by many social, economic, cultural and political challenges including those adversely affecting the rights and well-being of young girls. It was in this context that UNICEF UP with the support of the IKEA Foundation planned, designed, implemented and completed an exciting project called GARIMA (Dignity in Hindi). GARIMA was designed to empower adolescent girls through raising awareness around Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) and through MHM, also address girls’ education, safety, privacy, child marriage and other critical social issues. An initial UNICEF study revealed that most adolescent girls did not know what was happening to their bodies around the tim...

By Detlef Palm We were four staff from UNDP, WFP, UNFPA and myself from UNICEF. Our Directors had commandeered us, in 2001, to work out the technicalities of how the staff of the four Funds and Programmes should talk to each other in the field. We were asked to suggest modifications to our policies and procedures, so that staff in our country offices would work in harmony with their peers from other agencies, that they would avoid duplication said to be sapping energy, and that they could more effectively help governments to solve their countries’ most serious problems. We were the programme guidance focal points of our respective agencies. It was our job to know the details of organizational policies and procedures by which our agencies design their programmes, take programmatic decisions, allocate funds, spend money, pursue results and report on them. We knew the relevant board decisions and strategic plans. We also knew the weaknesses in our respective systems – the procedures and i...