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August 29, 2002: Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF discusses the world's children with host Jamie Rubin.
Jamie Rubin:
Carol Bellamy, thank you for joining me.
Carol Bellamy:
Thank you.
Jamie Rubin:
You will be representing UNICEF at the upcoming Johannesburg meeting. Tell me, what will your report to the world leaders be about the state of the world's children?
Carol Bellamy:
Well, it will be that over the last decade, since the conference in Rio, conditions for children have improved, but less than had been expected. Around some of the issues, particularly, that will be focused on in this meeting -- for example, access to clean water, better sanitation, health issues -- there is some good news. For example, the number of children that die due to diarrhea has been cut almost in half, and that's as a result of better interventions and more access to clean water. Guinea worm, which is something that nobody really knows about in the United States, but it really exists and it's very bad, has been reduced dramatically. But far less has been accomplished than had been expected.
Jamie Rubin:
So some progress, but not as much as been expected. How do you think these meetings shape up? Is it valuable to have the heads of state of the world sit down together, renegotiate issues they've talked about? Do we need these global summits anymore?
Carol Bellamy:
Well, I'm of several minds on this. I think that these meetings were crucially important in the 90's. I think they help set out some agendas, the environmental agenda, the children's agenda, the population agenda, agenda on women, very important in really targeting specific goals and objectives, and I think that we would not have seen some of the movement that has taken place over the last decade. I'm not convinced that this mode is necessarily the appropriate mode into the future. I think that there are ways to review the progress and look at how you do course corrections. Further, I think that what has become clear as well is merely having a plan of action without really active, aggressive leadership, government leadership, private sector, civil society, you're not going to get much. So to the extent to which there are heads of state there, I think the crucial element is to get the commitment of this leadership because another meeting with just another plan of action, I don't think will do much as we head into the 21st century.
Jamie Rubin:
We do know what we need to do in most of these areas now, do you think having the meetings makes it more likely that we'll do what everybody seems to think we should do?
Carol Bellamy:
I think we should look for a different mode now. The global meeting era, while very useful and important in the 90s, may have passed its usefulness. I think, looking regionally or sub-regionally, really monitoring what has been achieved against the agreements that had been made in the past, and these are very serious agreements, some of them had been binding agreements, others at least there was a moral obligation to pursue. I think we should look for alternative ways to review and see what success there has been and where there still needs to be work.
Jamie Rubin:
Let's talk for a minute about some of the dilemmas that came up in the film we just saw, starting with child labor. You're the advocate for the world's children. Do you find yourself on both sides of this issue, the child labor issue, in many parts of the world?
Carol Bellamy:
Well, it's a far more complicated issue then I think some people would recognize. We at UNICEF have never particularly been enthusiastic about boycotts. We think the boycott makes the boycotter feel better, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't child labor. Most of the basis of hazardous child labor is really deep, abiding, long-standing poverty, and you can't just wave that away by passing a law saying "no more hazardous child labor." That being said, really this is very detrimental to the development of children, and one has to look for ways to begin to make a change. One of the ways is to try and avoid the very youngest children of a family going into child labor, perhaps by assuring that they at least get some education. There are now programs in places like Brazil and Mexico and other places, where families receive a small income if their child is in school. The basic reason is not because parents want to send their children out to work in these terrible conditions, it's that it is poverty, and they will not survive.
Jamie Rubin:
So in some cases, the child laborers are the breadwinners for these families.
Carol Bellamy:
They are the breadwinners. Now that is another interesting element. Often the exploiters of children in hazardous child labor, realize that they are better able to exploit children than adults. So very often we will also advocate that if you need workers, use the father, use the mother, not the child. But very often the mother and father will be more demanding of the conditions and more demanding of some improvement.
Jamie Rubin:
One of the other dilemmas we saw in the child from Kenya is the desire for education and how some families are split up by the desire for education. What work have you done in this area of UNICEF, in Africa, and do you find that sometimes the battles between the mothers and the fathers that we saw in this film happen elsewhere?
Carol Bellamy:
Well, I actually thought, if there was a positive element in the film, it was a recognition by so many that education is a very important key for any kind of advancement, any reduction of poverty. But you do run into conflict, you run into conflict with parents, mothers or fathers who think, particularly for girls, what's the need for education, she's just going to get married, or in an environment where the economy is so bad - is there a job after education? There are costs to education, particularly in poor countries, I think in the richer countries, people don't always remember this, but even the cost of a uniform for the child, even the school fees that have to be paid, these can sometimes be beyond the budget. So parents need to make choices, and very often they will choose, in so many places of the world, that the boys will go to school instead of the girls going to school. So education is, I think, on balance still desired by parents for their children, but parents are put into this painful position of not always being able to support their children going to school, and very often only one child or two children, of many, will go to school. So it is still a divisive issue in families, although less divisive than so many others.
Jamie Rubin:
You were recently in Afghanistan, opening schools there. Can you tell us a little bit about the enthusiasm that has accompanied the opening of school in Afghanistan?
Carol Bellamy:
This was an extraordinarily wonderful environment, the back to school opening day. It was March 23rd, which is when Afghanistan schools open. This is a country that had been at war for more than 20 years, so the education system had virtually stopped functioning, and certainly during the Taliban era, when girls were prohibited from going to school, there were no girls in school, and teachers were limited because women were prohibited from working, and many of the teachers were women. So, opening day of school, there was a big effort made to try and get kids back into school. It was estimated that there were five million children eligible for primary school. On opening day about a million and a half kids, girls and boys, about 30 percent girls, came back to school, and since that time -- unlike other countries, where very often you'll have drop-off -- with the refugees coming back, the fact is the school enrollment has gone up. So, if there is a hope in Afghanistan, and this is a country that is going to take a long, long time for there to be improvements, I think it is that there really is a very deep commitment being made and put into education. Again, a reflection I think of what we saw in the film, which is that the great hope of parents is that their children will have a better life than they had.
Jamie Rubin:
Can you talk a little bit about the funds you needed in Afghanistan to open a school, how would you go about doing this? Sometimes people imagine that this is expensive, to start an education system, or build the infrastructure, how do you go about actually promoting education in Afghanistan or other places?
Carol Bellamy:
First of all, I don't always talk about schools. I think you have to talk about learning. Because if you talk about schools, then you think about a big building and it has all the facilities. Very seldom it does. We're very happy if we can try and assure that there is even the basic sanitary availability there, and maybe access to clean water, that's what we think is very important for a place where kids are going to learn. Clean water, some kind of sanitary facilities. But what we did, is we tried to help this Afghanistan interim government through the provision of materials. So every kid got a school bag, and you should have seen them walking with these school bags, it was quite wonderful. And in the bag they had a textbook and it was either in the Dory language or the Pashtun language, they had a little slate board, they had pencils, pen, very simple things, a little notebook to write in. We supported the provision of tents, where there was a total destruction of what had been the school or at least a building where…
Jamie Rubin:
UNICEF distributed this?
Carol Bellamy:
We did and we were supported by the United States government, the Japanese government. I would say they were the two governments with the biggest support. The Afghanistan administration made a commitment to do this. There were non-governmental organizations that helped because they had helped keep some of the informal schools going during the period of time. But the fact is the kids came to school and they actually, they weren't just sitting in open areas, we tried to do school repair at that time. There's still much to be done, but I think, if there is a sign of hope for Afghanistan, it is this real desire to get and continue education.
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Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF
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