JPG - Saint, Sinner, or Dynamic Leader
by Kul Chandra Gautam
Jim Grant was, in my view, the most charismatic, dynamic, creative and consequential leader in the 75-year history of UNICEF. In a chapter of my memoir entitled, “What makes UNICEF special?”, I ranked the comparative performance of UNICEF’s seven Executive Directors over the past seven decades. Based on my admittedly subjective but fairly well-informed assessment, Jim Grant ranked 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.
That does not mean Grant was perfect. Like all of us mortals, Grant was, of course, imperfect and fallible. Those of us who had the opportunity to interact closely with him could readily see some of his frailties and foibles. His dogged optimism was, at times, unnerving. His knack for seeing a silver lining even in the darkest cloud, was astonishing. His belief in being able to extract some child-friendly policies even from utterly vile characters, including the world’s worst dictators, made some of us nervous. His ability to address a broad range of issues from the world economy to agricultural, industrial, trade or defense policies; from ancient religions to modern technologies; and matters of war, peace, human rights and climate change, and circling back to link them all with prospects for his favorite child survival and development revolution, was flabbergasting.
While Grant’s admirers were a legion, there were also some very harsh and persistent critics and skeptics who questioned and disapproved of his judgment, priorities and leadership style. I would group the most common critiques in five areas:
Was Grant too simplistic and mono-focal?
Citing that it was a moral outrage that 40,000 children were dying in the world needlessly everyday while there were proven and low-cost interventions to prevent such deaths, Grant advocated for a set of “doable” goals to dramatically reduce infant and child mortality. Growth monitoring, Oral rehydration therapy, Breastfeeding and Immunization were cited as the most cost-effective interventions that could bring about a child survival revolution. He further added that Female Literacy, Family Planning and Food Supplements would further accelerate and help sustain dramatic progress in child survival and development.
His critics derided GOBI-FFF as Grant’s naïve and simplistic formula to tackle the world’s complex development challenges. How about building health systems? How about developing a more comprehensive primary health care system as agreed at the Alma Ata conference on PHC?
Critics accused Grant of over-simplifying the world’s development challenges by boiling them down to just a few technical interventions aimed at reducing child mortality. After all, development is much more than reducing the quantity of deaths. How about the quality of life, social justice, gender equality, economic development, human rights, protection of the environment, and building of systems and infrastructure to sustain development gains?
For those of us who knew Jim Grant well, this was a false and superficial critique. Far from being simplistic and narrowly focused, Grant had a broad and holistic vision of development. He was very aware of the multi-faceted nature and complexities of development. He spoke forcefully on issues ranging from the need to end the “apartheid of gender”, to reducing military expenditures, providing debt relief and fair terms of trade for developing countries. He even challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of powerful international financial institutions and called for “adjustment with a human face”.
With the help his Deputy, Richard Jolly, and other colleagues, UNICEF documented how the structural adjustment policies of the Bretton Woods institutions - IMF and the World Bank - that forced many governments to balance their budget by cutting expenditures on health, education and social services, were having a damaging impact on women, children and vulnerable groups leading to increased malnutrition, inability of governments to replenish essential drugs or even pay the salaries of health workers and teachers. Grant used this evidence to challenge the orthodoxy of these institutions with a clarion call for “Adjustment with a Human Face.”
UNICEF’s well-reasoned and passionate case for protecting the poor and vulnerable in designing structural adjustment programmes gathered strong support from development activists, and eventually forced the World Bank and IMF to change their policies.
Grant advocated for the child survival revolution with a small number of highly “doable” interventions, not as a simplistic formula for just reducing mortality, but as a “Trojan Horse” for combating poverty, promoting democracy, slowing down population growth and accelerating economic development.
Grant was of the view that many development professionals and bureaucrats made tackling poverty seem so complex that ordinary people could not understand their message, and political leaders could avoid being held accountable by citing all those complexities and passing the blame on others. As a masterful communicator, Grant believed in demystifying the complexities of development problems, identifying the most doable, affordable and measurable interventions, and making them easily understandable and attractive to political leaders and their voters.
Grant reasoned that the visible success of practical actions on a large scale that directly benefited ordinary people, would provide the impetus for more investment for building systems and infrastructure. In most countries, Ministries of Health and other ministries dealing with women and children were often led by the least influential cabinet members with the weakest political clout and the lowest budget allocation. A grand success in improving children’s health through immunization, oral rehydration therapies, simple nutrition interventions, etc. that touched the life of every family would be a feather in the cap of such weak ministers, allowing their bosses - the President, the King, the Prime Minister or Governors to claim credit for such success, and do more.
That is precisely what happened in most countries, and the issues Grant promoted rose to greater national prominence, secured more budget and political priority. UNICEF’s reputation for effectiveness rose which Grant and his colleagues leveraged for further progress for children on a wider front. Far more than most other UN agencies and academics that proposed very broad and complex development theories and agendas but produced little results on the ground, UNICEF’s highly-focused and targeted approach reached millions of children and families with life-saving and life-enhancing services. UNICEF acquired a reputation of being an effective doer rather than an expansive preacher.
Did Grant under-emphasize women’s non-maternal role and family planning?
Grant’s singular and seemingly obsessive focus on child survival, and everything else being judged on the basis of what impact it had on child survival, was criticized by some women’s rights activists for neglecting the importance of women’s empowerment on their own right, not just in their motherhood role. Actually, as reflected in UNICEF’s flagship publications like the State of the World’s Children, Grant believed strongly in women's empowerment both in their role as mothers and as citizens in their manifold roles in society. What he was not too keen on were too many small-scale pilot projects, seminars and workshops that many women’s rights activists organized that did not produce large-scale impact on the lives of ordinary women and children.
Personally and intellectually, Grant was a strong believer in and supporter of family planning. But he felt that given the controversy around it in some societies and religious groups (including in important donor countries), it was prudent for UNICEF not to be too vocal about it, lest that seriously erode donor support for its child survival mission without producing concomitant benefits for the family planning programs. Grant cultivated a strong partnership with UNFPA and felt that the division of labour between the two agencies was very pragmatic and mutually reinforcing.
Contrary to the simplistic view that success in child survival would lead to population growth, Grant argued that it would be the opposite, that once parents have confidence that their first children survive they will actually have fewer children. This is a proven fact that demographers fully understood but superficial development workers and officials did not always grasp. The virtuous cycle of fewer children dying, liberating women from the burden of multiple pregnancies and other drudgeries, the surviving children getting better child care and education, more educated girls delaying marriages, having fewer children and becoming more autonomous and empowered was at the heart of Grant’s grand strategy.
That is why “female literacy” and “family planning” were core components of Grants GOBI-FFF.
Did Grant neglect non-health related child protection issues, education and WASH?
Another point of frustration for some UNICEF staff as well as its external partners was that issues of child protection such as children with physical or mental disabilities, orphans, child laborers, victims of various forms of abuse and exploitation did not figure as prominently in Grant’s agenda and advocacy as the issues of child health and nutrition. Here again, the issue was not lack of interest or commitment but Grant’s search for large scale impact with limited resources. Too often, NGOs, UNICEF staff and government counterparts came up with “pet project” proposals that would help a very limited number of children in difficult circumstances in one institution, a few communities or districts at considerable cost. While those “projects” certainly helped very deserving children, most of them had no demonstrable prospect of going to scale nation-wide or making a dent on the large magnitude of the problem.
Grant’s view often was that such projects were certainly worth supporting by local churches, charities and specialized NGOs and UNICEF could provide some seed-funding for developing innovative approaches and replicable models. But UNICEF would throw its corporate weight behind such projects when there was a convincing prospect for large scale coverage.
To the early frustration and disappointment of some UNICEF staff and counterparts, initially, Grant took a similar stand on water and sanitation and basic education. He needed no convincing on the multiplier effects of access to clean water, safe sanitation, hygiene and the extraordinarily transformative power of basic education. But he challenged us all to come up with approaches that were highly cost-effective and replicable on a large scale. When he saw, for example, BRAC reaching millions of children with low-cost, quality education in thousands of the poorest communities in Bangladesh, or India going on a “mission mode” to provide water and sanitation services in thousands of villages, he championed such actions with great enthusiasm.
It was not enough to persuade Grant that the problem was big or the suffering was profound. He would always ask “So, what is the ‘doable’ solution?”. This applied even in areas of child survival that were so dear to his heart.
I recall a long and passionate debate when we were formulating the goals of the World Summit for Children in 1990. It was clear then that malaria was among the biggest killers of children in Africa and HIV/AIDS was emerging as a huge issue. Many UNICEF staff and government counterparts asked that we should include some ambitious and measurable goals on malaria and HIV/AIDS. But at that time, we did not yet have such cost-effective interventions as the insecticide-treated mosquito nets or the artemisinin-based combination therapies or anti-retroviral drugs. So, very reluctantly, we did not include specific goals in these areas, vowing instead that UNICEF would vigorously support R&D in these important areas and would insert bold goals and targets at mid-decade if we came up with some cost effective and doable interventions.
Was Grant too focused on goals rather than rights?
Many NGOs and UNICEF National Committees pressed Grant to champion the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that had been in the making since Eglantyne Jebb first presented the idea to the League of Nations in the 1920s. Grant was initially reluctant for two reasons: 1) he was doubtful that the world would be ready for such a treaty during his life-time, and, 2) the draft CRC was heavily focused on child protection issues and did not say much about the right to child survival, health, education, etc. In other words, it emphasized the more conventional civil and political rights generally favoured in Europe and the West, rather than the social and economic rights that were given greater prominence in developing countries and the then Eastern Soviet bloc.
But when the proponents of the CRC showed their willingness to incorporate social and economic rights, and Grant heard from his field staff that there was growing support for the CRC in developing countries as well, he put UNICEF’s full weight behind the CRC. This helped accelerate the adoption of CRC by the UN General Assembly in 1989. It was thanks to Grant’s tireless advocacy that the CRC featured prominently in the Declaration of the World Summit for Children which became the fulcrum for the fastest and near-universal ratification of the CRC. So deeply committed was Grant to the CRC that his very last letter from his deathbed to President Bill Clinton was an emotional plea for the US to ratify the CRC.
It is therefore very unfair to insinuate that Grant was a reluctant supporter of the CRC.
Sadly, following Grant’s death some UNICEF staff started an unhealthy debate on “rights versus goals” portraying Grant as the champion of goals and trying to persuade his successor to distinguish herself as the champion of the rights-based approach as if the two were incompatible. An orthodoxy was introduced saying all rights of all children were equally sacrosanct at all times, and therefore it was inconsistent with the CRC to prioritize certain selected goals and targets.
Further, it was said that targets that were less than universal – e.g. reducing poverty by half, mortality by 80% or malnutrition by 70% percent, etc. during certain time periods would leave out the most vulnerable groups and therefore were antithetical to the rights-based approach. Such a dogmatic “all or nothing” interpretation of the rights-based approach was both impractical and inconsistent with the universally accepted provision of the “progressive realization” of social and economic rights.
Luckily, this unhealthy and unhelpful “rights vs. goals” debate subsided after a few years. The adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, building on the goals set by the World Summit for Children and heavily focused on children, was a vindication of Jim Grant’s pragmatic approach to setting ambitious goals and mobilizing maximum support for their implementation.
Was Grant a good leader but a bad manager?
Jim Grant was clearly a goal-oriented and results-focused leader. He empowered and delegated to his Deputies, Directors and field representatives considerable authority and autonomy so long as they achieved ambitious corporate goals for children. On the whole, this approach worked well and produced great results. But occasionally, there were instances of some staff and offices not following proper processes or abusing their authority. Some of Grant’s detractors, including on the Executive Board, highlighted such instances as a major flaw in Grant’s management style.
A multi-donor evaluation of UNICEF in 1992 highlighted some areas for managerial improvement. The1994 Booz-Allen management study also uncovered some more weaknesses and recommended changes in certain processes and organizational culture. Grant readily accepted those recommendations.
After Grant’s death, the Booz-Allen recommendations were used to usher in quite significant changes in “the structure of accountability” in the organization. Some of these changes were quite positive and helped the organization to modernize its management. But on the negative side, the organization swung a bit too far and became process-heavy and results-light.
Striking the right balance between running a tight ship and allowing creative energy and leadership to flourish is not a precise science but an experimental art. The ultimate test of the effectiveness of a UNICEF leader is to maximize the best interest of children. When confronted with the choice of playing it safe and being risk-averse or being bold, taking calculated risks and pursuing ambitious goals, I for one think that Jim Grant almost always made the right choice.
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