The King of Morocco was lecturing his visitor, Executive Director James Grant, about the beauty and sophistication of his country, describing it as "the France of the southern Mediterranean." When the King broke off his monologue to sip a drink, Grant characteristically seized the opportunity. "What you're saying about Morocco is true," Grant agreed, "except for one thing." "And what is that?" asked the King. "Moroccan children," Grant said, "die at 10 times the rate of children in France."
Grant, who led UNICEF for 15 years until a week before his death in January 1995, fortunately possessed the kind of subtle political instincts and ready charm that enabled him to deliver such vexing news without giving offense. If offense was seldom taken as a result of Grant's visits with heads of states, action often was. At the King's subsequent direction, for instance, Morocco made rapid strides in protecting children's health. Between 1985 and 1992, the number of Moroccan children immunized against measles jumped from 42 percent to 81 percent and the nation's children progressed on other fronts as well. Morocco became a success story in UNICEF's worldwide campaign to eliminate preventable childhood diseases.
For five decades, UNICEF has been encouraging, often prodding, governments to address the causes of children's suffering. Though the organization has striven to achieve its own obsolescence, war, famine and, above all, poverty and disease have conspired to assure UNICEF an ample portfolio well into the next century.
UNICEF was founded as a temporary response to a specific emergency. The idea of a children's relief agency was born from the chaos of World War II, which turned millions of children around the globe into refugees and scavengers. Orphans roamed the burned-out cities of Europe, searching for food amid garbage and for shelter amid rubble. Even children living with one or both parents often faced an arduous daily hunt for food and clean water. With diets severely constricted and medicine unavailable, tuberculosis, rickets and other diseases struck whole towns full of undernourished, weakened and ill-clothed children.
At the behest of US President Harry Truman, former President Herbert Hoover toured Europe in the spring of 1946, visiting 38 countries in 82 days to assess the need for relief. Hoover's successful organization of European relief during and after World War I had been one of the greatest achievements of his life. Now, accompanied by a small group of loyal aides, he was again charged with saving people who had just survived the most destructive war in history and were struggling to survive its aftermath. Since 1943, the Allies had been shipping food and medicine to Europe under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). But much more was needed. In June, after he returned from his tour, Hoover delivered a radio address in which he sketched the contours of an international organization devoted to the salvation of children.
"There are somewhere between 20 to 30 million physically subnormal children on the continent of Europe," he informed his radio audience. "There are millions of others in Asia╔The redemption of these children should be organized at once."
Hoover envisioned an international body dedicated to children and supported by all nations. The following December, the UN General Assembly created UNICEF - the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. In 1947, UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie named a Hoover protege, American investment banker Maurice Pate, to be the emergency fund's first executive director.
UNICEF's work began immediately out of Pate's Washington office. The quiet but determined son of a Nebraska banker, Pate had no children of his own. But inspired as a young man working for Hoover's Commission for Relief in Belgium during World War I, he possessed a bold sense of mission. The day after his appointment, Pate appealed to the US government for a whopping $100 million contribution to his fledgling organization. (He received $15 million).
Soon thereafter relief supplies, coordinated by UNICEF, began to flow into Europe. Several thousand tons of cotton cloth were shipped to countries that turned the fabric into diapers, blankets and infant clothing. Enough leather for more than 2 million pairs of shoes was distributed across Europe, allowing impoverished children to trade in the broken shoes and in some cases newspapers and rags that barely covered their feet. Supplies of cod liver oil arrived from Canada, Norway and New Zealand to halt the effects of rickets, caused by Vitamin D deficiency, which had warped the legs and stunted the growth of millions of malnourished children. (Many of the children were so small that relief officials often mistook five or six-year-olds for toddlers).
Vast quantities of milk powder were shipped from Australia, Canada and the US to children's institutions throughout Europe and China. As Judith Speigelman relates in We Are the Children, published in celebration of UNICEF's 40th anniversary, "The milk tasted much better hot than cold. Using big vats, volunteers experimented with recipes from UNICEF, adding noodles or macaroni to perk up the liquid. Hungry children were no different from other children; they drank only what tasted good to them."
UNICEF became closely identified with the milk it delivered in such prodigious quantities, gaining fame as the world's "milkman" and even employing the image of a child drinking milk as its international symbol. But the agency did more than just send milk powder to the hungry. It also aided the rebuilding of a shattered European dairy industry so that nations could once again provide for themselves. In doing so, it established a precedent it would follow for the next five decades.
By 1953, Europe's reconstruction was well under way, and many of the UN's industrialized member nations thought the need for an emergency children's fund had passed. As the world settled into the Cold War, funding for UNICEF dropped. Even UNICEF's most avowedly apolitical intentions appeared suspect when viewed through the distorting lens of East-West competition.
In October 1953, the agency received permanent status from the UN General Assembly, at which time it changed its name to the United Nations Children's Fund, but the original acronym was retained. Its role was broadened after it made a hard-fought case for engagement in developing nations, where millions of children died from hunger and disease each year and many millions more were crippled or stunted. This marked the start of a new phase for UNICEF, which set forth on a crusade with the World Health Organization to wipe out preventable childhood diseases throughout the world.
It proved daunting, however, to combat disease in developing countries, where education was limited and the infrastructure for communications and transportation was rudimentary. Although UNICEF often managed to obtain medical supplies at a discount, bringing them to people in need required both ingenuity and energetic commitment from governments, voluntary groups and local communities.
In Thailand, elephants brought healthcare providers carrying penicillin, syringes and equipment to remote villages. Itinerant workers conducted public-information campaigns to assure villagers that bending over to receive a piercing shot in the rear wasn't as crazy as it seemed. Indeed, it wasn't. A single shot of penicillin was sufficient to cure yaws, a painful, contagious and crippling disease that affected tens of millions worldwide.
At one makeshift outdoor clinic in eastern Nigeria, a team of more than two dozen healthworkers formed an assembly line to examine and treat Ibo villagers. Each villager was inspected carefully for signs of yaws, which often began with blisters on the soles and palms. Using chalk to write on the patient's back, a senior nurse inscribed the dosage of medicine the patient required. Health workers then soaped, disinfected and injected the right buttock of each patient.
Within two decades 160 million people in Africa were examined, 60 million were treated for yaws and the disease was eradicated. Through most of its history, UNICEF has collaborated with other agencies on major health and development undertakings. A case in point is the successful battle to wipe out trachoma, an eye disease that blinded millions of children. UNICEF and the World Health Organization worked together in eliminating it by supplying and distributing penicillin and other antibiotics, and educating and raising public awareness about the crippling affliction.
UNICEF's campaign against malaria, which involved the spraying of DDT, was the largest single item in the agency's budget in the mid-1950s. The campaign had mixed results, helping to eradicate the disease in several countries in Europe and the Caribbean but meeting resistance in other parts of the world.
UNICEF also helped build penicillin plants in Chile, India, Pakistan and Yugoslavia, so that those nations could begin producing their own medicine. "It was a typical UNICEF operation," Maurice Pate later said of Bombay's penicillin plant, constructed in the 1950s. "Instead of giving them penicillin, we gave them the tools to make their own."
By: Francis Wilkinson, (excerpt from Nuturing the Children), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones and Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
