The InterDependent

Anthony Lake, the new executive director of Unicef, fears that many children of the world tend to disappear in a haze of statistics, making progress on paper while neglect, abuse or impoverishment go undetected.

Unicef/NYHQ2010-0914/Ricci Shryock

Anthony Lake visiting the Thies region in Senegal.

As the Obama’s administration’s new choice to head the United Nations children’s fund, Lake wants to make what he calls “equity” his top priority; that is, correcting disparities among the world’s children. While national – or even world statistics – can show an improvement in the care of children or maternal mortality, pockets of poverty within a nation or within a community often tell a different story.

“We are working very hard now on reviewing our programs throughout the organization to see if we can refocus with a greater priority on getting into the toughest neighborhoods in the cities and the farthest communities to try to reduce those disparities,” Lake, who took office on May 1, said in an interview with The InterDependent in late July.

Among the measures sought are a focus on the poorest communities; competitions among municipalities for lowering the death rates, like the Brazilian government initiated; and continuous investment in girls’ and women’s education.

Looming in mid-September is another UN summit on the Millennium Development Goals, first adopted by world leaders in 2000 to alleviate extreme poverty through quantifiable targets. Among the eight goals are universal primary education, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health, the heart of Unicef’s programs.

In measuring child mortality, Lake said as an example of “equity” issues, you get different answers depending on the analysis. He pulled out three maps of Brazil, a middle-income country, which he said could be maps for any country in Africa or in south Asia. If you look at the country’s average mortality for children under 5 years old, Brazil has a low rate -- fewer than 17 per 1,000 live births. If the map is broken down by pockets of deprivation, the death rate would be double.

“If we focus on averaging alone, we could easily miss all the work that needs to be done … and result in an ‘easy win’ rather than finding the forgotten children,” Lake said. “I am convinced that this is not only the right thing in moral terms but also the right thing in practical terms.”

Unicef’s wide agenda, often with other agencies and local partners, includes many programs caring for basic needs of children. This can mean collecting health data on maternal mortality to alert midwives through cellphones in Senegal and trying to gain the release of and treatment for child soldiers in 15 countries.

“If you look at them as little killers and treat them that way, then this is being replicated over and over again through the generations,” Lake said.

His immediate predecessor, Ann Veneman (a Bush administration nominee) also concentrated on data, increasing updates from five years to three years and teaching Unicef and its partners how to use it. Her predecessor Carol Bellamy (nominated by the Clinton administration) promoted women and children’s rights, drawing scathing criticism from US conservatives.

Despite an open application process, it is no secret that Washington chooses the Unicef chief, who is formally appointed by the UN secretary-general. The US government contributed $63,272,000 and the US National Committee for Unicef donated nearly $25 million for the agency’s $3.25 billion budget in 2009.

Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was instrumental in getting Lake his job. He joked at a recent reception she gave for him that the young Rice was so forceful and talented that he hired her when he was national security adviser in 1993, and “I very much enjoyed working for her for the next four years.”

Associated with national security issues as an adviser, a foreign service officer and a professor, Lake, an energetic 71-year-old, also worked as the unpaid chairman of the US Unicef committee and went on several trips to the field with the group.

“I always loved Unicef -- what’s not to love?” he said.

And national security? “I kicked the habit.”