in some 70 individual countries. The IMF and perhaps the Bank too
was impressed that UNICEF not only talked the talk of a different
approach to adjustment but walked the talk, by showing that it was
possible to achieve big expansions in immunization and other
priority child-focused actions, even during a decade of severe
economic setbacks. By 1990, child deaths worldwide had been
reduced from 15 to 12 million, even at a time when the number of
child births had risen considerably.
In 1990, UNICEF organized the World Summit for Children,
which re-iterated a call for a new approach to adjustment and
agreed a larger core of goals. By the year 2000, the goal-oriented
approach had developed much further, into the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015.
A broader development strategy
These developments in the 1980s and 1990s added three further
links to broaden the development strategy, still important today.
First, UNICEF developed the concept of First Call for Children,
which stated that in bad times as in good, countries should ensure
that children’s priority needs have a first call on resources – a
principle accepted by most families for their own children but still
only rarely recognized in national economic policy.
Secondly, the concept of 20/20 was developed – created jointly
with Mahbub ul Haq at the time of the World Summit for Children
and then incorporated in the 1992 Human Development Report.
Given the desperate squeeze on resources faced by most countries,
the 20/20 principle recognized that additional resources needed for
children would need to be found from restructuring existing
spending rather than from new resources. We calculated that the
additional resources needed to ensure basic services for all –
primary health care, primary education, reproductive health and
family planning and the provision of safe water and sanitation –
could be found if each country allocated 20% of its national public
expenditure to these basics and each donor country, in parallel,
allocated 20% of its aid budget to the same priorities. Two or three
conferences were held in the 1990s to generate support for the
20/20 commitments, and some 30 developing countries