UNICEF France Chairman Jacques Hintzy

Entretien

UNICEF is one of the key players in grassroots-level efforts to curb AIDS and help children, and one of the Global Fund’s partner organisations. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has therefore met several UNICEF officials since she was appointed Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ambassador on 1 December 2008. We met Jacques Hintzy, a former advertising executive who worked pro-bono for UNICEF for a long time before becoming its Chairman, in his office in Paris. He told us more about the French arm of the fund that the United Nations set up for children, in 1946 in New York.

What exactly is UNICEF?

We are the UN agency that deals with issues touching on child survival, development and protection around the world. That, in practice, entails setting up healthcare and education programmes, and protection and survival programmes, for young children. We basically work in countries with very low GNPs and very high infant mortality rates. That means countries where there are children in prison, children fighting in wars, children forced to work, sexually exploited children, orphans, etc. We also try to involve children in the decisions that concern them. In Mali, for example, there is a Children’s Parliament, and there are veteran children soldier associations in Sierra Leone. I am also thinking about that 10-year-old divorced girl in Yemen who did a lot to raise awareness of premature marriage. The more we include children in decisions, the more they will contribute to civic life later on.

How do you work with governments?

UNICEF is UN branch, so governments are our ‘shareholders’, so to speak. We come in to play a social engineering role, so we work around consensus. We work through our in-country contacts to survey the situation, map out a programme, get it voted through in New York, and then roll it out with governments. In China and India, two big countries, we start with pilot programmes and, when we see that they work, governments can stretch them to the rest of the country.

Is there a mechanism to curb precarious living conditions?

In theory, there are ten levers to curb child mortality rates. But that changes from one country to another. So we have a wide range of services to choose from, and have to find the right ones for each situation. UNICEF is lucky to have a decentralised operation. We are there on the ground all the time, so we know have a fairly clear picture of the problems.

How does UNICEF work in France? Is it a subsidiary?

There are three sides to UNICEF France. It is the French arm of a UN multinational, working as a not-for-profit association here. It has 80 staff on its payroll, including 75 at the main office, which means that it is also a small business, in a way. From another angle, its 6,000 volunteers in 130 towns and cities in 80 French departments make it a franchise network of sorts. The point is to get everyone on the same wavelength. Volunteers, for instance, bring in talent that we couldn’t afford otherwise. There are top-level lawyers, entrepreneurs and other leaders sharing their expertise with us for free.

What role do ambassadors play?

When I first arrived, I wasn’t comfortable with the ideas of using “celebrities” to serve our cause. Suffering children was just too serious to take the risk of sending out an ambiguous message. I figured we weren’t here to make them look good because doing that could make us look bad. But I got that all wrong. Famous people can rekindle concern over issues that people have heard about all too often to bother about anymore. They put us in touch with new audiences through the media. They use different words that get the message across in different places. A number of target audiences don’t listen to us but listen to singers and actors. The words they use are not as technical as the ones we use: they tug at your heartstrings. Emmanuelle Béart, who was a UNICEF ambassador, uses words that we don’t. But we need household names, people who have already made it. I am thinking about Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (a TV journalist), Corneille (a singer) and Myung-Whun Chung (an orchestra conductor). We don’t go and ask them; we wait until they come to us. Mandates last two years. Actress Mimie Mathy, our new ambassador, had decided to donate the royalties from one of her books to us, so we got in touch with her. In exchange, we expect them to go out and work on the field once a year or every year and a half. It’s an investment: it takes two or three days to prepare, one week to do it and two or three days to tell the press about it when they come back. We have a clear message and a positive image but, besides our greeting cards, people don’t always really know exactly what we’re doing out there. That’s why we have a full-time video director on our staff, and take journalists to see what we are doing on the ground. Our ambassadors are the ones who state our case, so to speak.

How does UNICEF France finance what it does?

In two ways – communicating and fundraising – without trying to combine them. By communicating, I mean sending out messages about international solidarity programmes. The message about children interestingly applies in France too; even though we don’t qualify for a programme (our GNP is too high, as in any other developed country). The funds come from five sources. First of all, there are the greeting cards. We sell 10 million a year, and they bring in 20% of our resources. Then we mail out 8 to 9 million forms a year, 500,000 people around France send us cheques, and 109,000 of them have agreed to send us €12 to €15 monthly transfers. Then there are bequests and life-insurance donations (70 to 80 a year). They add up to 10% of our resources. Corporate sponsorships and marketing provide the fourth source of funding. We have about 30 partner companies including Ikea, France Telecom, Danone, Pampers and Clairefontaine. The rest comes from events that we don’t organise, but reap a large part of their proceeds. In total, we spend €41.5 million a year on UNICEF programmes. About 30% of that goes to programmes that we choose to work on and 70% goes to the low-GNP and high-infant-mortality countries.

What about UNICEF as a whole?

Worldwide, UNICEF has US$ 3 billion to spend on 1.5 billion children. So that’s US$ 2 per child, per year. France’s public sector, as a point of comparison, has a €6 billion budget for 300,000 children (which it spends on welfare, benefits, and so on). So, as we don’t have much money, we have to rank priorities. We have five:

- Child survival: the goal, here, is to prevent children dying before their fifth birthday. We spend 50% of our budget dealing with inadequate childbirth conditions, neonatal tetanus, water and wastewater, severe malnutrition, vaccines, etc.

- Schooling: we run literacy programmes (to teach children to read, write, count and so on) for children up to age six.

- Children with AIDS: we are especially involved in efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission in East- and Sub-Saharan Africa. We can prevent transmission in 95% of cases, but people have to agree to take the test and take the treatment – and only one in three women do. We also run prevention campaigns targeting teenagers and antiretroviral programmes for children. There are also programmes for AIDS orphans (there are 13 to 14 million of them in Africa). These children didn’t just watch their parents slowly waste away: they saw their income vanish and neighbours take over their land, and most probably fell behind at school.

- Curbing exploitation and violence against children: here, we are working with children in prison, children soldiers, children exploited as forced labour and sexually exploited children.

- Convention on the Rights of the Child: we are working on global programmes to make sure children enjoy their rights. To fight trafficking in children, for instance, we have to make sure governments pass laws, watch their country borders and prosecute dealers, and make sure that people are aware, that children know about it, and so on. So it takes complex action on a number of fronts.

You are one of the main organisations working to eradicate AIDS among children. What is the situation there?

For a long time, many people saw no option other than giving up on children with AIDS. They just figured it was inevitable, even though medicine for grown-ups had been around for years. Luckily, they have since changed their minds. And we have seen – we know for a fact – that there are fewer HIV-positive youths in 20-odd countries. There are 15 million AIDS orphans worldwide, and 13 to 14 million of them are in Africa. About 2 million people die because of AIDS every year. One in three infected children gets treatment (75,000 worldwide in 2005 and 275,000, i.e. 38% of the children who have the virus, by the end of 2008). In 2008, 4.9 million youths (aged 15 to 24) were living with AIDS. But we still need women to agree to and be able to take the test and antiretroviral treatment.

What has changed since UNICEF France opened in 1964?

We are a sustainable-development agency. That’s why our programmes run for four years. More and more, however, we are responding rather than anticipating. Today, 30% of what we do is dealing with emergencies, so we are rolling out six-month plans. In Haiti, for example, we managed to build up our team from 50 to 250 people in a month. We managed to use our experience on the ground to get things going really quickly. You have to get it right, fast. It’s like working under war conditions. There are camps with one shower for one hundred people. It’s amazing how well it works, though.

Why did you personally get involved? Did something trigger it, something you still remember?

I really care about children and all the opportunities we can give them in life. But it was during a trip to Ethiopia and Yemen, when I saw young girls spending their day patting manure into cakes and drying them on their hut walls to use them as fuel. That was when I decided that I had to start doing something about improving the conditions that children were living in. That was 35 years ago…