the North were multiplied several fold in the repercussions affecting
children in the South.
By this stage, structural adjustment was in full swing. At the
periodic meetings of the then UN’s Administrative Committee on
Coordination (now UN’s Chief Executives Board for Coordination,
UN CEB), chaired by the Secretary General with the participation
of all the UN agencies, usually including the heads of the World
Bank and of the IMF, Jim Grant became the leading voice arguing
the need for some change in policy – especially to respond to the
immediate and urgent needs of children. Within a few months, we
had worked out an agenda of specific actions – Adjustment with a
Human Face. Again, this combined careful analysis with country case
studies – with Ghana and Sri Lanka among the first of the case
studies. Interestingly, it was M. deLarosiere, the then Managing
Director of the IMF who initially showed more interest than the
Bank – and brought some of our findings into one of his ECOSOC
speeches. By 1988, UNICEF had published its two-volume study,
Adjustment with a Human Face, with strong inputs from Frances
Stewart as well as Andrea Cornia.
From adjustment with a human face to development with a
human face
Soon, UNICEF started moving from adjustment with a human face
to development with a human face. By this, we meant that the real
problem was not so much to provide short term protection to
offset the setbacks of structural adjustment but to get back to a
positive path of development, with concerns for children fully
incorporated into advancing human development, even if economic
growth was still constrained by the international context and
pressures. For UNICEF country programmes, this meant a strong
focus on child survival and development – through priority actions
in health, education and the provision of safe water and basic
sanitation.
In the 1980s, there was a sharp focus on reaching 80% coverage of
immunization and associated actions by 1990. In spite of the lost
decade for economic development, the immunization goal was
largely achieved on average in developing countries and specifically