The Anthropologist: Stories of UNICEF’s Africa Section

by Deirdre LaPin

My time with “Chief” and colleagues UNICEF’s Africa Section in 1986 was brief but filled with enjoyment and valuable lessons. As an anthropologist and Africanist coming from the “field” in Cotonou, Benin, this was my first experience of headquarters and the processes and relationships that drive a large, multinational bureaucracy. My co-workers from around the world were as welcoming as they were fascinating. Chief had spread us out in a novel open plan and filled the space with his kindly and always watchful gaze. I was seated between Jim Mohan and Vincent O’Reilly. A post-war American raised on cold war dogma, I was especially drawn by our Soviet team member Boris Beliak. He poured over the daily newspapers and with humor described his “real” after hours work at the Soviet “Little White House” in Brooklyn where he stayed. At one point I was alarmed to see him disappear for a few days during a diplomatic tiff between his and our host country. Not long after he and his wife Tanya triumphantly returned, armed with a delectable afternoon tea of caviar, blintzes, salmon and sour cream for all to share. There was no doubt that Russian cuisine at least had won the contest!

In those days UNICEF was on the cusp of adopting a new health financing strategy we had piloted in Benin and planned to scale up nationwide. The “Bamako Initiative” (misnamed in my view) provided basic health services to community members at a modest fee. The price covered essential drugs plus a small mark-up used by a local health committee to pay for additional health or social services. Few realize that we started the scheme in Benin to finance the Expanded Program of Immunization. We knew that despite some funding from the Italian government, the existing primary health care system of minimal budget, decrepit health centers, broken equipment, and demoralized staff would never meet the EPI challenge. A revolution was needed … one that eventually spread to Africa as a whole. The EPI dimension also injected healthy local competition into the strategy, as communities throughout Benin raced to outdo their neighbors on rates of immunization coverage. Combining the financing strategy with a measurable objective gave the “Cotonou initiative” an additional fillip. To keep the initiative on track, I proposed a new project position, which was shared between Benin and Guinea. For many years after, those two countries had the best immunization statistics in West Africa.

Lessons learned from the Africa Section were big and small: the importance of teamwork and camaraderie, writing a clear and succinct telex, coaching a country office to apply a new program strategy, encouraging annual reports to be written on time. Several colleagues from African Section reemerged in places where I was later assigned. My friend Boris turned up in Somalia to assist with our post-UN evacuation effort more than two years after I joined that UNICEF Office. In June 1988 UNICEF played a major role in evacuating 287 foreign nationals from Hargeisa, which was under attack from the Barre Administration at the start of the long Somalia war. UNICEF’s Peter McDermott organized the UN staff and contractors in a safe haven and led them to the airport for departure. Leaving behind all but 20 kilos of their possession, the evacuees were shuttled 22 at a time in tiny planes to a construction camp 900km away in Garowe, where they waited several days for the onward shuttle to Mogadiscio. Meanwhile, for ten days nonstop a WFP colleague and I manned at the USAID compound the only working radio from the capital to Hargeisa. We continuously relayed messages between our local UN security walkie-talkie network and the pilots ferrying passengers or Peter sequestered in the safe haven. The messages, extensively monitored by the BBC, KGB, and all local embassies, included lists of evacuees, ETAs and ETDs, requests for protective gear including flack jackets, food supplies for the Italian chef at Garowe, and two dozen kerosene lamps needed to light Garowe’s dirt airstrip at night. We were relieved that all passengers arrived safely in Mogadiscio, only to be expelled from Somalia days later by the President who accused them of abandoning their official duty station in the north.

With his arrival, Boris relieved the workload that followed the evacuation. His stay, however, was short. I learned while I was away on leave that he had been sent to Nairobi for a workshop and from there to parts unknown. A second disappearance, but this time no caviar followed! Not long after Chief himself made a welcome reappearance in my life. At the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for my long-awaited MPH course, I was surprised when informed by the Dean that Chief had negotiated a remission on my tuition. Once again the African Section, through kindness and watchfulness, brought about a welcome change.

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