Q&A: Henrietta Fore on driving change at legacy institutions

NEW YORK — Henrietta Fore’s career has taken her from the boardrooms of major multinational corporations to the front office of the world’s largest bilateral development agency, and now to the top spot at one of the most recognizable humanitarian brands on the planet. The executive director of UNICEF sat down with Devex Editor-in-chief Raj Kumar for an interview about the state of humanitarian and development funding, the prospects for results-based financing, the untapped potential of digital identification, and United Nations reform. “If we can balance our funding between the two decades, and if we can balance our funding between humanitarian and development, it will be a much richer future for everyone.” --— Henrietta Fore, executive director, UNICEF This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Give us a sense of what your day is like. Are you on the phone with members of parliament, or congress, or funding agencies saying, “you need to pay attention to this topic”? Making the case for humanitarian and development assistance is an ongoing activity for everyone in UNICEF. We try to bring attention to the most forgotten places ... I just came back from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. This is an enormous challenge that the world now has, with a million Rohingya refugees within Bangladesh. Their everyday lives are dependent on what funds we can raise. But then there are forgotten countries — Central African Republic, Mali, South Sudan. That don’t make it in the headlines. They’re very seldom in the headlines. As a result it’s important that UNICEF bring up what the situation in the country is, what the needs are, and so it’s very much a part of our lives. I would also tell you though that when we are talking to ministers, it is important to bring up issues that we have seen that aren’t being funded at all. One is mental health. There is not enough funding for psychosocial support. I have been to a number of countries in which you will see children and they are really terrified with what they have seen, and they need help. They need safe places to play, they need safe spaces to learn and to connect with another child. We don’t have enough money for psychosocial support, mental health, all of the scars that you do not see in a child. So we try to bring that up with development ministers and with people all over the world so that they know it’s essential for children. This is a challenging time to have your job because, as you said, the needs are greater than ever before, the number of conflicts that are out there, the number of crises. Yet a lot of governments are questioning foreign aid. How do you see that playing out? Every minister, every parliamentarian is also usually a mother or father, and there is a humanitarian heart in everyone. As a result, I do not worry too much that humanitarian needs will not be funded. I worry more for the development, the longer term, that people will feel that governments can look after their own countries. “Social cohesion … begins within a school.” --— There are so many governments that are so fragile, and we have just begun to try to get the country back together. One of the greatest needs we hear is the need for education systems to have social cohesion built in so that young people in a classroom know that someone who is of a different political entity or a different tribe, let’s say, in Syria, that they should be in your classroom, and how you deal with them. Or if you’re in the Sahel, that it might be the farmers and herders. But social cohesion … begins within a school. Looking at your own funding, every year a larger share goes to humanitarian emergency response. But yet you are an agency dedicated to doing both development and humanitarian response. We also get more funding for the first decade of life and less for the second decade of life — partly because we know a lot of the answers on the first decade and we can point to, let’s say, early childhood development, or life within the first 1,000 days, how a brain develops, what nutrition they need, what kinds of activities and stimulation parents can give. We know much of that. But then comes the second decade of life and it’s quite a puzzling time for many families and governments, and as a result we don’t tend to get as much funding. We’ve now launched Generation Unlimited to try to rebalance that. Not losing a moment of interest and attention to the first decade of life, but to make sure that funders know a child’s life does not end at 10, that secondary school is extremely important and it is a time when the brain grows again. We do not know enough about them, but it’s a time when they need to learn life skills, they need to learn vocational skills, they need to have digital skills, and they need to have those fundamental skills for learning. If we can balance our funding between the two decades, and if we can balance our funding between humanitarian and development, it will be a much richer future for everyone. I’m curious what you think about the idea of funding for results, as opposed to more traditional grantmaking and contracting that you see in many donor agencies. Results-based funding, I think, is a good idea. Sometimes, we can take measurements too far though. So if we have 5,000 measurements they become too many. Yes, it does tell us something — we have to spend time on the analytics of those measurements — but we need to get results and measurements to be something that is useful for the country itself, so that they can use it in how they run the country, and so that we who are helping the country can use it in the actual management of our programs … Results-based contracts and measurement-based contracts can all be excellent ways to address development, but they have to be used with the intent in mind of real time management of our programs. Do you think we’ll see more of that in the future? Will UNICEF be a player in that results-based financing space? We are now a player, and I think we will continue to be, and we will do more of it. We will try to be smarter about how we can let our partners report at the point of service so that — let’s say when you’re giving a vaccination to a child — it is not just that there is a vaccine that now needs to be replenished, but that I know who you are, that I have your identity as a child. I know that I’ve given it to you, Raj, and you therefore are in my data bank. And I can upload that into a real time system. That’s what I would hope we are moving to. We’ve got lots of innovations that we are interested in, and I think it will be the future for us. But we’ve got to accelerate them so that real time point of care reporting will be very useful for results-based development projects as well as measurements. “We’re not talking enough to private industry. They’ve got a lot of solutions that they’d love to put to use for humanitarian and development work, and we’re not in constant contact.” --— How do you assess where, not just UNICEF, but where the broader humanitarian and development community is in terms of leveraging resources that exist today around data and around technology to deliver better services for children? Overall as an industry I think we’re way behind. We’re not talking enough to private industry. They’ve got a lot of solutions that they’d love to put to use for humanitarian and development work, and we’re not in constant contact. How do you diagnose that? Why is it that we are still so far behind? If you were a country director for USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], or any of the bilateral agencies, or if you’re UNICEF or any of the multilateral agencies, you spend a lot of time with the government trying to make sure your programs are aligned to their priorities — with their ministries, with their capacities, and you try to fill in the gaps. That does not leave you much time to actually talk to the businesses locally. We’re trying to give all of our people at UNICEF time to reach out to the local business communities, the multinational businesses to see what innovations, what product services and platforms they have that we could put to use. If we can put them to use, then the local governments and the development community and the business community all work as one. At UNICEF, we are doing a lot of this, but we are not doing enough. This will be public and private. We have some collaboration with Telenor and several other telephone companies where you can take a photograph of the baby and send it in to the government so that there will be a birth certificate and you will know the name of the child. So there is at least identity. And it is extremely important. But all of these types of activities will be done in public-private partnerships. In many cases, like with the Rohingya, there’s a challenge with government and whether or not you want to share identification data. There’s more than a billion people in the world that don’t have a digital ID. Is that something the U.N. will eventually hold for refugees and people who are in very fragile conflict situations? I would think the U.N. will hold that data and that we need to get to that point so that any person who is a refugee will have an identity, and they will be someone [for whom] we know exactly what services they need. Let’s say that you have a member of your family who has a disability of some sort. It would be good for us to know you need picking up, or you need transportation to go to school, or that you need a wheelchair, or that you need a device that will allow you to hear in the classroom. All of those types of information will be very important to us — as the U.N., but also as the development community. As you know the U.N. does not do it alone. We do it with many, many partners, and the nonprofits are magnificent partners for all of us and they need this data too. So, we would need to have some shared platforms, but platforms that are protected, that are safe, and that are helpful for identity. I’m curious about your take on U.N. reform. What are you hoping that will lead to for an agency like UNICEF? What I hope for UNICEF is that we will be part of a close collaboration with other agencies. For instance we were talking about refugees — with UNHCR we do lots of work together, lots of advocacy, lots of protection for children and their families as they are fleeing borders. With a close collaboration it means you can build on and leverage each other's strengths. It’s true for every agency. I can see it with World Food Programme and with WHO [World Health Organization] and with UNDP [U.N. Development Programme] and all of the programs that are around us. I would hope that the U.N. would be able to integrate more fully and also that it would become a little easier to understand if you are a local government, so that you know which agency to go to for which issues. But that specialization might be a challenge too. For a group like UNICEF, you do everything. When it comes to children, you do water and sanitation, education, and health, right? So do you think that specialization will actually change the way UNICEF works? Is that what U.N. reform will ultimately lead to? I don’t know. At the moment we’re so busy looking after children and young people and we have so many more we have to reach. But we are very open to collaboration and integration and whatever the future will bring so that we can reach more young people and children. “How the U.N. does its work is as important as the work it does.” --— I think it will be important though, as individual agencies, that we also focus on our operations — the cost, the time that we spend, and also how we do it ... [We] have been very focused on preventing sexual exploitation and abuse, preventing sexual harassment and abuse of authority. All of these will be important. How the U.N. does its work is as important as the work it does. And what’s your take on how it does its work? You’ve been here a little over a year now. You used to run one of the largest development organizations in the world — USAID. What do you see as the differences … What’s your assessment now that you’re in this chair? The differences are interesting. Because in the U.N., we are really a humanitarian agency, so we talk to everyone. As a result, we are talking to partners that, as the U.S. Agency for International Development, you do not talk to as often. Do you mean in conflict situations? Usually in conflict situations. As a humanitarian [organization] it is very important that we cross borders and cross lines so that we are there whenever children and young people need us. It’s also a very interesting community of countries, because here your board are the member states, so they do decide on the policies and the environment in which you work. And the United Nations, as you know, is at work on peacemaking and peacebuilding all over the world. So how UNICEF as an entity can help with that is complex, interesting, worthwhile, important. The difference is you’re probably involved in more peace negotiations as a U.N. agency than you are as a bilateral donor. There’s a lot of skepticism about the U.N. and how it operates — is it efficient? Is it overly bureaucratic? What’s your assessment? We are all spending far too much time on paperwork, and we all need to modernize our systems. This is governments and U.N. agencies alike. It’s all over the world. We just have to think forward, we have to think flexible, nimble. How we can react to the needs of the future? … We’re trying to shorten our timelines, lighten up our processes, and multiskill our people. One of the things we’ve found, in some areas such as in Afghanistan, is that parents in these areas that still have polio virus get tired of bringing their children in for the vaccines. But we really need them to bring them in. So if we can also offer nutrition, counseling, if they can get a little bit of food, if they can get other vaccinations for their children, if they can get some health monitoring, that primary health care that is so important and is a driving need for young families — if we can offer that, then they’ll come in for their polio vaccine. The more we can be multisectoral, [the better]. Which means that our people cannot be in stovepipes, they cannot just know one area, they have to know a broad area. That’s a changing of a culture, and that’s going to be important for us in the future.