UNICEF’s next major encounter with economists came a decade or
so later. By the late 1950s, UNICEF became convinced that
children would never receive the priorities they deserved unless
their needs were fully integrated into national economic planning.
“[E]xperience in the poorer countries had shown that it was not
only very difficult to compartmentalize children’s needs, but
positively counter-productive.”^16
From humanitarian welfare agency to development agency for
children
In 1964, UNICEF invited a core of distinguished economists and
planners to a round-table meeting in Bellagio, the Rockefeller
Conference Centre by Lake Como in Italy. Jan Tinbergen, later to
be the first winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, was present
along with Alfred Sauvy, and Hans Singer. Professor V.K.R.V. Rao,
chairman of the Indian Planning Commission and initiator of earlier
UN work on Special United Nations Fund for Economic
Development (SUNFED) chaired the conference. Ministers of
economic planning from Tunisia and Tanzania, then Tanganyika,
also participated along with observers from two of the UN
economic commissions and from FAO, WHO, ILO and the
Bureau of Social Affairs. Perhaps I might add that at the time I was
in Addis Ababa, as a graduate student, collecting data for my thesis
on African education. Hans told me of the conference and I sent
along a brief paper.
The starting point for the Bellagio conference was questions set out
in the background paper prepared by UNICEF:
How can the needs of children and youth be integrated into the
general objectives of development?
Given that the long-run objectives of development will within
fifteen years depend greatly on the present younger generation
for their achievement, how can this generation be prepared for
the tasks ahead?(^16) Black, M. (1986). Children and the Nations. UNICEF New York, printed in
Adelaide, p. 201. Maggie Black provides an excellent account of the Bellagio
conference and its long-run importance for UNICEF.