UNICEF Director Urges Unity

Citing a lack of cooperation between the private and public sectors and a disregard for the opinions of young people, United Nations Children’s Fund Executive Director (UNICEF) Carol Bellamy advocated renewed unity to improve the global situation for children yesterday.

Bellamy, who spoke in the ARCO Forum last night, said everyone must work with children to ensure that their opinions and feelings are not overlooked in the effort to relieve global problems, like poverty and disease.

“Young people’s voices are honest, they are untarnished, they are not sophisticated, there’s a clarity,” Bellamy said.

She said she can often learn more about the problems of a community from its children than from its adults.

Providing polio and measles immunizations to children in Third World countries are among the organization’s recent efforts.

In the face of a possible war with Iraq, UNICEF will send around 14,000 volunteers to Iraq next week to immunize more residents against measles and prevent an outbreak of the deadly disease, she said.

Bellamy said potential for an outbreak of disease would increase if military action forces Iraqis to flee from their homes, describing the increased victimization of civilians during wartime.

“The people who suffer most from war these days are women and children,” she said.

Bellamy said poverty, a pandemic of HIV-AIDS and limited access to education are also among the greatest threats to children today.

She said philanthropic organizations and corporations must work together to improve the quality of life for children around the world.

Bellamy said in her experience in both the public and private sectors—including 13 years as a member of the New York State Senate, seven years as an investment banker and two years as the executive director of the Peace Corps—she has come to see a tension between the two fields that prevents them from working together for humanitarian causes.

She cited a mutual lack of respect between the two sectors as the barrier to their working together but emphasized a need for to join their resources to help children.

She encouraged students to educate themselves about other parts of the world and become involved in the effort to relieve global suffering.

“I believe because of technology we live in a world where young people can learn much more about the world than they were ever able to in the past,” Bellamy said.

Humanitarian aid funding provided by the US government on a per capita basis is far below that of other countries, according to Bellamy.

She said young people should lobby their local legislators to take action against world poverty.

“I believe that there’s never been a time when in international development international humanitarian investment has been needed more,” she said.

—Staff writer Nura A. Hossainzadeh can reached at hossainz@fas.harvard.edu.