Both questions were recognized to be related to economic policies,
going far beyond the traditional humanitarian approach to children
and far beyond approaches focused mostly on under-privileged or
handicapped children.
The Bellagio round-table was later described as the most important
meeting in its seventeen-year history. It marked the change of
UNICEF from being a humanitarian welfare agency for children to
becoming a fully-fledged development agency - concerned with
children in all aspects of life. It laid the foundations for UNICEF’s
subsequent “country programme approach,” introduced in 1972.
The country programme involved three steps: first, an analysis of
the needs of children in the country, building on the comprehensive
Bellagio perspectives; second, an assessment of what the country
and other groups within the country needed to do in response to
these needs; third, and only as a later and separate third stage, an
analysis of what UNICEF could do to help get country action
underway. In other words, UNICEF recognized that the main
actions for children needed to be part of the country’s whole effort
for development to which its own resources and support could be
catalytic but not more. Gradually over the years, the country
programme approach was improved – and, much later, spread to
other parts of the UN.
Commitment to policy change in the face of crisis
The 1980s were years of debt, recession and structural adjustment,
with the most serious and severe repercussions on people – and
children –especially in Africa and Latin America. The focus of
economic concern within UNICEF had to shift from long-term to
short-term, from development to protection. By that time, Jim
Grant was Executive Director of UNICEF and I was his deputy
responsible for programmes. We also had the great help of Andrea
Cornia. In 1982 and 1983, Andrea and I organized a series of
country assessments of how children were being affected by the
triple economic onslaught – and we pulled the results together in a
publication, The Impact of World Recession on Children. Hans Singer and
K.N. Raj joined with us in the analysis. Hans insightfully analyzed
how the impact on children arising from downturns of recession in