Being asked to look back on my ten years with UNESCO brings me to reflect on my contributions, admittedly significant and universally acknowledged, during that period and the factors that contributed to them.
During the first half of that period, I was Director of Basic Education in the Paris headquarters, spearheading at the same time the global effort of the Education for All (EFA) campaign. As Colin Power stated at my farewell reception, "in no small measure, UNESCO's leadership position in basic education over the past decade can be attributed to your unfailing commitment to Education for All." In the second half of that period, I was the Director of the regional field office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok , UNESCO's largest office outside of Paris , tasked with the responsibility of making the office the dynamic hub of UNESCO's work it once was for the region. During that period, the credibility and visibility of the office improved markedly, as attested by a colleague in his testimony, ". your legacy and words of wisdom will stay on and influence our future decisions and actions for many years to come. What UNESCO PROAP is now speaks of the high powered direction and guidance you have given to it. You are the best boss we have had so far."
A confluence of factors
To be sure, whatever success I experienced during those two phases was due as much to a fortunate confluence of circumstances and events as to my own personal efforts.
It could not have been a better time to join UNESCO. It was 1990. There was a new visionary Director General and a new Assistant Director General for Education, both of whom personally invited me to join the organization. The historic Jomtien Conference on Education for All, in which I played a significant role, had just concluded. A fresh wind was blowing.
It could not have been at a better level within the Organization. I was offered a senior D-2 post, just below the ADG, in UNESCO;s flagship sector, the Education Sector. It was a level not senior enough to be tied up with diplomatic and political obligations or bureaucratic chores and meetings, but senior enough to have the authority and flexibility to fashion programs and command the respect and cooperation of the professional staff and colleagues with whom I worked.
It could not have been in a better division. I was the Director of the largest and most central division in all of UNESCO, put together just before I joined by combining departments dealing with various aspects of basic education. It was in many ways the face of UNESCO to the member states and their Ministers of Education.
I could not have had a clearer and more compelling mission. Largely because of the impetus of the Jomtien conference, I was tasked with the Herculean assignment of addressing the world's basic education needs: 100 million children globally had never seen the inside of a classroom, and 960 million adults-one out of every seven men and one out of every four women-were illiterate. Where basic education did exist in some form or another, much remained to be done with regard to quality, relevance, and resources.
The need for carefully articulated strategy
Unfortunately, the ambitious and wide ranging scope of my mandate was not matched by the meager financial or even human resources at my disposal. The budget available to the entire division was smaller than that of a faculty of a typical medium size university in the west. As for human resources, very often there were only one or two specialists in each area of concern; only one expert in school health, one in learning assessment, two on early childhood education, one on special education, and so on.
As it was not feasible either to significantly increase our budget or the size of our division, the alternative was to jointly craft a cohesive strategy that would assure the maximum impact and benefit from our limited resources.
The exercise of strategy formulation, which took place every two years to coincide with the budget and program cycle of UNESCO and its general conference, turned out to be useful not only for the optimum use of resources, but also for providing a sense of teamwork, coherence, and mission to the entire staff of the division. In the past, there was a tendency for each professional to work on their specialization, independent of what other colleagues were doing or of the goals of the division in general. Moreover, there was the temptation to be an expert in their given field, but not necessarily to be a change agent; the temptation was to know more about the subject rather than to do something about it. But UNESCO was not just another academic institution; it had a mandate to be of service to member states and make a difference, to help effect changes and improvements on the ground where feasible and appropriate. The strategy sessions had the additional objective of getting each person to articulate how their work related to the overall work of the division, and to articulate further the specific and measurable ways in which their work would make a real difference or impact.
Needless to say, the process took several sessions, some in workshop sessions outside the office and on weekends, over several months. Over time, group concensus and team building took place, and the division's overall mission got translated into a strategy in which each professional found his or her proper niche. Attached is a schematic picture of how this strategy was eventually articulated. On the one hand, the division neded to address the millions out of school and illiterates, to expand access to them. This meant targeting countries, targeting groups, and strengthening EFA alliances. On the otherr hand, the division needed to address the quality and relevance of programs for those already with some access to basic education. This meant dealing with the content and process of education (curriculum, learning materials, innovations), teachers and other EFA workers, and the information base and conditions of learning (school nutrition, school buildings and furniture, community support). Within this overall scheme, each professional located his or her area of expertise and saw how his/her specific work contributed to the goals of the division as a whole. Linkages and possibilities of collaboration with other professionals, not only within the division but also outside of it, also emerged and were pursued.
In hindsight, these strategy sessions turned out to have effects well beyond the original intent of maximizing our resources to get maximum impact from it. The sessions created a sense of teamwork and camaraderie that was the envy of many other divisions, and gave individuals, pressed to articulate specific targets, a sense of purpose. They were no longer just experts in something; they has a mission to effect a very specifc change, either in a given number of countries or in an innovative approach to a problem area.
There are many examples of how this transformed the work of professionals. One specific case study illustrates this. The area of education for those with special needs was handled by only one professional in the division, with a very limited budget, assisted by a secretary and a young intern. Instead of just responding to various requests for assistance from member states, this professional looked at worldwide practice and came to the conclusion that many countries still addressed this area by setting up specialized schools for those with various handicaps and special needs, instead of trying to develop mainstream schools to absorb these target groups where possible. This second approach was less expensive, widened access to the target groups and did not sequester them form society for schooling and eventually for life, and had the added benefit improving the quality of teaching for the majority as teacher learned to teach to learning needs of specific individuals with different capacities and different needs. It thus became the goal of the special education professional in my division to effect major policy changes in this regard in as many countries as possible. Regional workshops were held, teachinmaterials and handbooks were produced and translated in several languages, country consultations and visits were conducted. As a capstone for the effort, a global conference involving 88 countries represented at the highest levels was held in Salamanca in 1993 and a declaration was issued from it, articulating the philosophy of mainstreaming special education. The impact was dramatic and measurable, representing a real turning point in the philosophy of special education worldwide; many countries explicitly changed their approach to special education, and access of these target groups to education, especially in countries which could not afford the expensive specialized schools, increased significantly. My colleague, who came to be known as the UNESCO apostle of the new special education credo, had achieved a major shift in policy and increase in access in many countries throughout the world almost singlehandedly, with the support of her superiors all the way up to the Director General.
Parallel examples exist among other specialists in the basic education division. Pressed to articulate their competitive advantage, and to specify the targeted outcomes of their efforts, they worked with motivation and a purpose that translated in effective programs. This was true of the experts in school infrastructure (promoting technologies for low cost school building), learning assessment (working in 38 countries to standardize methodologies and criteria for testing), education of girls (evaluating various intervention programs and advocating the most effective ones), teaching-learning innovations (producing and disseminating videos and coloarul attractive brochures on selected success stories worldwide), and so on.
I was not spared the exercise of doing the articulation of my own goals and targets as head of the division. My advocacy role was helped by the unfailing support of the ADG for Education and the DG himself, as they both tirelessly emphasized that Education for All was the absolute priority of UNESCO. (It is no small consolation that today, more that sixteen years since the start of the Education for All campaign and my joining UNESCO and heading that movement, the current Director General still affirms as strongly as ever that this priority remains unchanged.) This translated into giving my division a position of primacy, and the freedom to articulate innovative strategies, programs, and initiatives sometimes not normally seen in the standard bureaucratic procedures of the organization.
Achieving and sustaining this primacy, and the stewardship of the inter-agency collaboration for EFA required establishing credibility, and for this I found that gathering information, analyzing, digesting and packaging it, and then disseminating it through various fora, was most effective. Even in the days before powerpoint became a standard mode of communication at confereneces and meetings, I found the use of visual supplements to my presentations very useful in conveying a lot of data and information in a simple and effective way, and my summaries of global, regioinal, and country progress towards EFA were universallhy appreciated and established UNESCO as the hub of information and the nodal link for EFA activities worldwide.
It was also my task to identify and flesh out specific programs and projects that could generate maximum impact with minimum resources.
Here again, there are many examples of how programs got articulated. Perhaps the case study of the E-9 project, the project focused on nine of the highest population countries, best illustrates this. The enormity of our mandate to address 900 million illiterates throughout the world with a miniscule budget was indeed intimidating, and yet we needed to find some way to make a real impact. Reviewing our information base, we came to the realization that most of these illiterates were in India , China , and the other large countries. Through a process we eventually identified nine countries, which together contained 72% of the world's illiterates. We therefore concluded that if we could help effect a real change in these nine countries, we would have gone a long way to changing the global picture. And so we set about to see how that could be done. Obviously, dramatic changes in these countries would require dramatic upward shifts in priority, awareness, and most of all budgets. Conversations with the Ministers of Education of these nine countries quickly revealed that these Ministers were just as interested as we were in achieving these upward shifts, but they saw the difficulty of effecting such shifts at their level, as they had to compete in budget negotiations with other ministries such as defense, health, and so on. We came to the conclusion that any significant shift required the attention and explicit participation of the head of government himself. Thus was born the idea of an Education for All Summit of heads of government of these nine countries. With the full support of the ADG and the DG, and with the collaboration of agency partners UNICEF and UNDP (later the World Bank and UNFPA also weighed in), the idea of targeting the significant reduction of illiteracy in these countries by getting heads of government to pledge the necessary priority and budgets to this cause took shape.
Convincing heads of state or of government to commit to this initiative was obviously a task beyond my level or that of my division. Fortunately, the DG saw the potential of the project and embraced it wholeheartedly; he and the head of UNICEF took it upon themselves to personally visit the head of government of each of the nine states to persuade them of the importance of a literate citizenry for their future and to solicit their support for the summit. The Prime Minister of India at the time, already concerned that his country had the highest number of illiterates throughout the world, one quarter of the world's total, caught their enthusiasm and offered to host the summit. My division was given one year to prepare for the summit and to work with the nine Ministers of Education and with UNICEF and UNDP. During the course of the year, as we helped each country with their preparations, it became apparent that each head was not willing to be outdone by his peers, and had set in motion with their parliaments and budget ministries actions and policies that they could bring to the summit. The summit became, in a way, a bragging contest, as many of the heads were to come prepared to announce significant new legislation and/or quantum leaps in budgetary allocation for basic education. By the time of the summit, six of the nine countries came with specific pledges of substantial increases in resources for primary education. Calculations after the summit showed that these pledges translated into billions of dollars over the next five years, and an additional 53 million places in primary schools which would otherwise not have been there, absorbing many of the 82 million out of school children in these nine countries.
This project to me showcased the potential of strategic intervention on the part of UNESCO; our budget expenditure was limited to the preparatory missions, the conduct of the summit itself, and the necessary documentation and information dissemination to support and give substance to the initiative. And yet this limited expense resulted in the release at the national level of millions of dollars, and created millions of new school places, exemplifying the proverbial hundredfold of a strategy creatively conceived and carefully implemented.
The above case study also illustrates two other key factors in whatever success the division of basic education had: the role of expanded partnerships with other agencies and collaborators, and the importance of close collaboration with the countries themselves.
Perhaps because the task of this division was so central and so important, it was obvious that it could not be undertakan alone, and it was inevitable that working partnerships with UNICEF, UNDP, the World Bank, and others be strengthened and sustained. Even beyond the E-9 project it became apparent, for example, that UNICEF had a far greater reach and presence in the field than UNESCO did, and that the World Bank, with a cadre of education specialists just as competent as in greater numbers than UNESCO itself, and with explicit country focus and leverage from its substantial loans, yielded an influence and a presence at the country level that could not be ignored. Thus, in the E-9 project, in the follow up activities to the Jomtien conference, and in the campaign for EFA in general, many of the division's activities were in reality collaborative projects with UNICEF and the World Bank, and often with UNDP and UNFPA as well. Collaboration extended beyond this to other multilateral organizations and bilateral institiutions and donors, as well as to the NGO community and to specific professional organizations. In the first case study mentioned above, for example, the division developed close working relationships with international organizations of the physically handicapped, of the blind, of teacher organizations, of federations of teacher training institutions, and so on. Without such collaboration, effecting a major change in policy at the national level and sustaining its implementation would have been an impossible task.
The second key factor contributing to the effectiveness of the division was the close collaboration with the members states, not only in implementing projects, but also in working with them in the identification of priority needs and formulation of projects with the greatest impact. There is no substitute for the mutual respect, trust, and friendship that serves as the foundation for this collaboration. My colleagues in the division had developed good working relationships with their counterpart specialists in several countries in which they worked, and through which many of their projects were implemented. At my level, I made a special effort to cultivate good ties with the Ministers of Education. There is no substsitute for actual visitations to them in their countries; even when formal invitations were to speak at a conference, for example, I went out of my way to visit the Ministers and learn about their priorities, their problems, their plans. It was the rapport developed through such visits and follow up correspondence that enabled me, for example, to organize and host a two day caucus of selected ministers during one of the UNESCO General Conferences, taking some twenty like minded ministers over a weekend to an retreat venue just outside of Paris . It took them away from the formality of documents, endless speeches and media coverage of the General Conference, and enabled them to informally exchange views on matters of mutual concern over meals, in small groups, during long walks in the countryside, and in cordial fireplace settings. It enabled me to learn the priorities and real needs of member states, and to identify for them areas where UNESCO could be helpful. Feedback on the experience was very positive; there were even some pleasant unexpected outputs. Two ministers set up a bilateral arrangement to tackle a mutual problem and set up an exchange mechanism. One minister offered to host the next ministerial caucus and in fact did so the following year, this time attracting more than 30 ministers. Various projects of my division found more than a receptive welcome and support from these ministers wherever their countries were involved.
When I transferred from the basic education division in Paris to head the regional office in Bangkok, I relied on the same factors that proved so effective: building up of a vibrant team spirit and morale, the collaborative articulation of a clear vision and strategy for the office, specific enough to give direction but broad enough to include actual target for each professional, increased collaboratioin with other agencies and partners, and ever closer working ties with ministers and educationists from member states.
I recall conducting, within the first month of arriving in Bangkok , a three day retreat at a beach resort away from Bangkok with the entire office staff, secretaries and messengers included. The objective was the hammering out of a motivating vision for the office and a coherent strategy for the office, for each unit, and for each individual within that vision. But other agenda items ranged from the scheduling of vehicles and drivers to quality control procedures for office publications. Both professional and support staff felt validated and saw their contributions to the whole, and the retreat became an annual event that everyone looked forward to.
It was in many ways similar to the Paris strategy sessions I had worked so well with, but different in some ways. For one thing, the office included professionals from outside basic education and indeed from outside the education sector: those from the social science, culture, and communication sectors. My responsibilities had narrowed from global concerns to concerns of the Asia Pacific region, but had expanded from basic education to education in general and to all the other areas of competence of UNESCO. It provided me an opportunity to put into practice the often expressed desire to develop interdisciplinary projects, something with which I had little success or experience in the over-compartmentalized bureaucracy that was headquarters. Even then, it proved no easy task. We started an inter-disciplinary project for specific coastal areas, for example, where science looked at the ecology of the particular coastal area, culture looked at the sea based traditions and practices, basic education looked at literacy community leaerning centers and expanded their use to be available to projects from the other sectors, communication used these leaerning centers to experiment with appropriate communication channels for the community. Implementation ran into some difficulty, as my colleagues sometimes did not get the needed support from their counterpartr or superiors at headquarters for projects that were not "theirs."
Examples of professionals identifying specific outputs and goals upon which to base their work and careers can be given. To cite one example, the establishment of community learning centers, locally organized, sustained and largely funded, was envisioned to be a key element in the campaign against illiteracy, but soon came to be in many instances a vital center of activity in the community, offering not only literacy, but also various forms of continuing education and community development. With Japanese government funding support, the Bangkok office propagated the expansion of these centers in some 27 countries, providing them with manuals, workshops, comparative studies, and other forms of support. Culture identified the training and sustainable dimensions of preserving and maintaining cultural sites and monuments. The specialist in higher education pioneeredin the exploration of virtual campuses and distance learning, creating in the procerss the Asian association of distance learning institutions. The social science unit looked at migrations patterns and overseas labor and drew out policy implications for consideration of the member states.
Smaller ministerial caucuses were also held. I remember in particular the one with five Asian ministers of higher education and an invited higher education minister from Africa to give them an interesting comparative picture. Soon after that, the African minister sent one of his deputies to the Bangkok office to intern for further training in data analysis and presentation.
Being in a field office led to even closer collaboration with member states and agencies. Letters, phone calls, and later emails between the office and member states became more frequent and personal; needs were articulated more quickly and concretely, and projects were designed with more relevance. Budgets in field offices were even more limited and constrained that those in headquarters, so we had to learn how to do more with less, and indeed to do more with other people's money, whether they be from the member states themselves, or from our partner agencies. Once again working with UKNICEF, the World Bank, and UNDP became invaluable because of their greater presence at the country level. They were largely organized by geographic areas, whereas UNESCO was largely organized by substantive issues and topics, so the collaboration was mutually beneficial. When a country was faced with a spedific problem, UNESCO brought to bear its substantive inputs and the others brought to bear their familiarity with the country situation as regards that issue.
But no matter who the partners were, the key to long term success in any field project was in the end the commitment of the member state itself. Too many times, projects launched by UNESCO and others thrived as long as external funding was available. The moment funding was over and the project deemed terminated, the work at the country level dwindled to where it was before the project started. Only in instances where the country itself felt an ownership of the project and recognized the potential of its long term benefits did the project endure. In my experience China stood out in this regard. To cite one example, the pilot school reform project in Jilin, China originally conceived by the education head of the province as an integrated project involving teacher training, curriculum reform, parent involvement, and some infrastructure for the 11,000 schools of the province. When UNESCO was approached for assistance, it could provide assistance to covef only seven pilot schools. The education head used this assistance eto effectively transform these seven schools with a specific philosophy and methodology and only asked for UNESCO assistance again for consultation and for a workshop to disseminate the experience of these seven to about 200 other carefully selected schools. The 200 schools adopted the same approach and methodology of the first seven, and over two years met with good success. UNESCO then helped in further refining the pilot school successes and over time all 11,000 schools adopted the methodology or some aspect of it. Here again, UNESCO reaped the hundredfold; with only limited financial support, it helped catalyze the transformation of thousands of schools in this province, well beyond the project life. But here again, it would not have been possible without the dedication and unflagging commitment of those responsible at the country level.
It was during my tenure in Bangkok that UNESCO celebrated its 50 th anniversary. It serves as a timely reminder to the staff, and to myself personally, of other original purpose for which UNESCO was founded and of the underlying motivation that needed to guide our efforts. It brought back to mind that UNESCO was born out of the ravages of a devastating world war for the purpose of, in the immortals words of its constitution's preamble, "building the defences of peace in the minds of men." It provided me personally with another dimension to motivate my work. Just as I had advocated our work in education was not just academic, for we were not a university, so also I realized our work was not just technical either, for we were not just an education consultancy firm. The motivating force behind our effort in improving education, or culture, or communication, or science, was not just in improving it for its own sake, but for improving it as a building block for the firm establishment of a lasting peace, for a world of harmony, equity, and justice.
It is with a sense of satisfaction and pride that I look back over my ten years in UNESCO. It is hard to find an organization with overarching goals as lofty and as worth dedicating oneself to as this. And I had the good fortune of being placed in two key positions in that organization with the potential to make a real difference. There were shortcomings of course. Lack of delays of budgets or various approvals sometimes stymied otherwise worthwhile initiatives. The attempts at interdisciplinary projects did not always prosper. In hindsight, I should probably spent as much time collaborating with other units in UNESCO, even within the education sector, as I did with other education experts from other agencies, thereby creating needed synergies. But all in all, I can look back and honestly say I took the opportunities given me and did the best I could to tranform them into concrete activities and projects which, together with the colleagues in my teams, made significant impact and to that extent made this world a better one for future generations.
