Episode 6: Right in Principle, Right in Practice

Richard Morgan has over 20 years of experience working in international development. He is currently the International Advocacy Director at Plan International. Prior to this he was the Director of the "child poverty" theme for Save the Children, where he co-founded and co-led the Global Coalition to End Child poverty. Previously he was a Senior Advisor to the Executive Director of UNICEF on the post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda where he co-led a global consultation and policy analysis on inequalities. Richard earlier served as the director of policy and practice at UNICEF HQ where he was responsible for leading on policy, standards and practices in the areas of gender equality, children's rights, child and youth participation, social statistics and communication for development. He joins us from London, UK. 

Richard speaks to us about:

• the MDGs and SDGs

• disaggregating data on inequalities

• using a human rights approach

• child participation in policy processes

• the interface of children's rights with economics - and more.

Transcript

Intro: My view of development changed dramatically when I joined UNICEF in 1986. I had been interested, after leaving Botswana and doing some volunteer work, to join the United Nations, UNICEF happened to approach me for that particular role in Mozambique. And in my first two or three years with UNICEF this historic moment of the adoption by the UN of the Convention of the Rights of the Child happened, so I was influenced by that, I was influenced by a number of thinkers in UNICEF who tried to develop concepts of children’s rights that applied to development and I was very influenced by that as well.

Safa: Hello and welcome to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I will be your host as we speak with and learn from development practitioners of all ages and affiliations around the world. Each week, we aim to rethink ethical behaviour and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Richard Morgan. Richard has many years of rich experience as a leader in a number of international development agencies. He is currently the International Advocacy Director at Plan International. Prior to this, he served as the Director of the child poverty global theme for Save the Children, where he also co founded and co -led the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty, which comprises of 20 international partners. Previously, he served as a Senior Adviser to the Executive Director of UNICEF on the post 2015 Development Agenda, where he co-led a global consultation and policy analysis on inequalities. Before this work, Richard also served as the Director of Policy and Practice at UNICEF headquarters, where he was responsible for leading on a range of issues such as humanitarian response and disaster preparedness, as well as policy standards and practices in the areas of gender equality, children’s rights, child and youth participation, social statistics and more. Earlier on Richard had worked with the government of Botswana and lead advocacy work for the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child for UNICEF with several other African countries. Richard, thank you so much for speaking to us today.

Richard: It’s a pleasure Safa and greetings.

Safa: You have had quite a robust and rich range of experiences and leadership roles across different agencies over the years. Could you begin by telling us how you first started down this career path and what you were hoping to achieve through this work?

Richard: Thanks again. I’ve been very fortunate in my career. I started to be very interested in issues of African development, in particular, when I was in university. And I tried to extend my work in economics and the courses I took around economics in order to be able to be somehow useful in an African development context. I started out because I was very idealistic in the late 60’s and the first half of the 1970’s about the possibilities of ending global poverty and seeing a more just and equal world. So I tried to shape my initial study and career choices around those interests

Safa: I see. And in the beginning of your career, when you worked with the government of Botswana and in the eastern and Southern African region, could you tell us about that time and how things operated in terms of the international development sector at that time?

Richard: I was again very lucky in my early 20’s to be assigned to the government of Botswana as a Junior Civil Servant, I was in the ministry of Finance and Development in Gaborone as the Agricultural Desk Officer and that brought me into contact with a wide range of donors that back in those times were supporting and funding the government of Botswana across the range of rural development programs, farming, livestock, integrated rural development and so on. So I, in the course of that work, learned a lot about how bilateral and multilateral development partners operated from the point of view of the national government. So Botswana was very much a learning ground for me, I also worked at district level in the Kalahari, across the whole range of sectors and supported district level planning and program development. Again, many different aspects both of social and economic development in Botswana. Later, when I joined UNICEF if I was given opportunities to work at the regional level as well as in humanitarian response, particularly in Mozambique but at the regional level covering about 22 countries in eastern southern Africa. I was the Program Officer for UNICEF in that region so again was able to work with a number of country offices and national counterparts in developing programs, addressing children’s rights and the most urgent and critical issues affecting children in those countries.

Safa: At that time what were some of the ethical issues that you grappled with or that really stood out to you, or that were of concern to you?

Richard: I think in the early part of my career and working in Africa there was a lot of emphasis on development as a general concept because many of the countries were fairly recently independent and were looking for economic growth as a primary concern. Growth that would then generate revenues that could be invested in people through education, health, and nutrition and rural development in particular. I think this approach — focusing primarily on economic growth made an important transition from the perhaps late 1980’s onwards and began to be modified with firstly a human development approach, focusing on how people develop their own capacities. This was very much influenced by the work of Amartya Sen , the uptake by the UNDevelopment Program ,UNDP, of Amartya Sen’s work and capturing that in the human development approach. The World Bank to some extent took than on as well and this influenced I think the whole sector. This in turn — a human development or if you like, a human capital approach then became over laid with human rights considerations. And this is where particularly I personally became very enthused and committed to a human rights based approach to development. Working with a number of peers and mentors in UNICEF and beyond, and building on the adoption and ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as now the most widely ratified international human rights instrument. The adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, I think, caused us to rethink some assumptions about the development process and how they should be applied in practice, bringing in principles of universality, nondiscrimination and also a strong ethic of participation and much more of a, you know, wish to see a more kind of balanced and equal relationship between donors and governments on the one hand, and those people whose lives and families and communities are at stake in the development process. And that you know, people who are poor or are deprived of voice who are marginalized in societies should have the right to self expression and to their best interests and views being respected and this I think is still a challenge in international development.

Safa: You mentioned advocating for the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Could you perhaps tell us a bit about that process and what it was like working with governments who perhaps, as you say, are recently post independence, they’re grappling with many different social issues. How was it to advocate for and bring different countries together to help ratify the convention?

Richard: I think as it turned out, the ratification process. with one or two important exceptions was a relatively easy exercise. Historically it had happened very fast that a large number of countries did quickly, fairly quickly, ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the 1990s. However, the big challenge then came in terms of translating the formal ratification into meaningful change for children. And this, I think, posed a number of challenges, not least to government capacity, but also to interpretation and internalization of what this quite powerful convention really means for national legislation, for national policies, for development strategies, for the way that people take part in their own development, for the voice and agency of children. A wide range of issues then came up — commonly there were exercises or initiatives to reform juvenile justice systems, which was a new concept. There were national plans of action that I supported a number of governments in Africa to develop that were intended to intensify investments in basic services for children in particular, but as well a number of issues around the protection of children came up and that was also child protection. An area where a whole range of innovations took place over time and were very challenging because before the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the tendency was to look at specific groups of children, often in a very sort of narrow way. The children who live and work on the streets, children who became orphaned, for example because of HIV and AIDS, children affected by conflict. But this didn’t amount to a systems based approach to the protection of children, which required consistency and building capacity across communities, local government, national government policy and budgets and you know the social norms that need to protect children in all situations. So I think juvenile justice budget reform in ways that supported basic services for all children, child protection, these were three major issues that came up in the wake of the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I think a fourth one that we are still grappling with and I think, still remains in need of a great deal of progress is the issue of child participation. In the convention the rights to self expression -based on age and capability for children, the rights to information — that children should be informed of their rights, the rights to assembly and representation. All of these are quite new and challenging in most societies, whether in Africa or Europe, or across all regions traditionally — as you know, Safa, children have been so called ‘seen and not heard’ in most societies throughout human history. And the Convention on the Rights of the Child puts forth the proposition that children have the right to be heard and not only heard but also heeded. That children’s views need to be taken into account in decision making and their best interests need to be primary consideration of decisions taken on their behalf by adults. All of this, I think, is very new in human societies and very challenging.

Safa: Absolutely, as you say, what is enshrined in law is not always exercised and many people don’t have the means or the understanding or the opportunity to exercise their rights. But you also mentioned earlier that you worked in a humanitarian context as well in Mozambique. That’s a bit of a different context. Could you tell us a bit about your experience with that and the challenges that are inherent in working in a emergency context?

Richard: I’ll try, I think with the caveat that you know clearly each emergency context is different, is the result of specific, often local factors and sometimes with, particularly with the climate crisis we are now in, a number of global factors as well. But if we took Mozambique specifically, this was a particular situation in the second half of the 1980s whereby Mozambique as a very new country, I think it’s fair to say with severe limitations on government capacity, was confronted with what at the time was described as a ‘war of destabilization’ with which the neighbouring apartheid regime in South Africa was deeply involved. Whatever the rights and wrongs politically of that situation, it resulted in very large numbers of Mozambicans being displaced, some often within Mozambique, and sometimes across neighbouring borders so that much of the country was affected by insecurity. This means that the crisis situation was constantly evolving. In working for UNICEF at that time as the lead in the humanitarian response program and supporting a much wider range of efforts by government and partners in Mozambique, we I think were limited to short term responses. So what’s, you know, normally called relief. It wasn’t easy to address more structural issues such as restoring basic service, helping displaced people get access again to land, you know, to start growing crops again, to regaining their livelihoods. All of these were very difficult because the security situation was always a critical factor. So although, just to conclude on this, I think we tried to build in some of these recovery measures that would address some of the underlying factors in the crisis into the response, you know, getting kids back into learning situations, if not school classrooms, helping families reestablished family farming and production. This was often very difficult, and certainly the emphasis was on short term responses with food, medicines, you know, clothes, blankets and so forth.

Safa: Your commitment to working with children, for children, is this something that happened organically or was a conscious decision you made in your professional life?

Richard: I started out as a fairly conventional macro economist and as I described I was initially working for the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning in Botswana. So I took a macro view of thing. You know the conventional view whereby you support economic growth, the economy grows, it generates revenues, you know, through taxation basically that could be useful then for social development. My view of development changed dramatically when I joined UNICEF in 1986. I had wanted, I had been interested, after leaving Botswana, in doing some volunteer work to join the United Nations. UNICEF happened to approach me for that particular role in Mozambique and in my first two or three years with UNICEF, this historic moment of the adoption by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child happened. So I was influenced by that. I was influenced by a number of thinkers in UNICEF who tried to develop concepts of children’s rights that applied to development, and I was very influenced by that as well. So I would say it happened to me. But I went along very willingly with the view that children and the rights of children are now central to the development process and are a litmus test for any society, at any level of income, whether super rich or extremely poor. That the rights of children are and must be a central concern for progress and justice in any society. So I came fairly quickly to that point of view. But I think since joining UNICEF in the mid 80’s I’ve tried to develop, you know, theories and practical applications around children’s rights. Up until this day, I would say that the rest of my working career has been devoted to understanding the interface of children’s rights with development and particularly with economics.

Safa: When later on in your career, when you began to work on the post 2015 development agenda, what were some of the experiences you had in terms of the global consultations and the global commitment or motivation of governments to participate in that process?

Richard: Yes, this is a very interesting question and experience that again I was lucky to have. I thought back to the way that the Millennium Development Goals had been formulated, which I think it’s fair to say was not a participatory process. It did build on -this is in the year 2000 or thereabouts — it did build on a number of development goals and aspirations that had been, you know, evolved during the 1990’s so the MDGs didn’t come out of the blue. There was a process, different kinds behind it in education, in the children’s summit of 1990 , in the health for all movement, education for all and so on. So the MDGs did have a history on which to draw and I would also point out that the Millennium Declaration of 2000 was highly ambitious, idealistic and really significant. But the actual framing of the MDGs and the development of the targets and the choice of the issues to focus on, I think, all of those happened among a small group of people at the time. The contrast with the development of the Sustainable Development Goals and the agenda that was adopted in 2015 for 2030, I think is that there was a long and and quite extensive, if far from perfect process of consultation involved. And I was the lead person for UNICEF for the 1st two years of what turned out, I think, to be a pretty much four year process of consultation. There were a number of thematic consultations the UN led. There was a particular commission appointed by the Secretary General that looked at development issues at the time and there was a two year inter-governmental process led, if I recall correctly by governments of Kenya and Hungary that provided an open forum for all governments to participate in in framing the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. And I think those were four years pretty well spent, and time and energy well spent. The Sustainable Development Goals Agenda is much broader than the MDGs and I’m a supporter of the MDGs — with quite a significant focus on particular issues, particularly around human development, leaving out a number of issues, they did take human progress or helped to take human progress significantly forward in those 15 years from 2000 to 2015. I think the SDGs are much broader, much more challenging. They raise a multitude of issues for individual governments to consider and look and address. Choices need to be made on where to focus at any particular time on phasing, on development strategies. The SDGs don’t provide those answers, but they do pose the challenge I think of how strategically to focus on different development challenges countries are facing and how to kind of balance those and integrate them with environmental constraints and concerns.

Safa: During the process of consultations were there any specific issues or challenges that you felt that had to be overcome to keep the process going forward?

Richard: There were many. And I think it’s really interesting again when we look at issues that have been taken up by the SDGs quite explicitly that were not strongly recognized in the MDGs. So one is issue of inequalities. The Millennium Development Goals, at least for the first several years of their operation, looked at aggregates, looked at aggregate progress. Global level and at national level, and there was limited attention if at all to looking at the progress achieved by specific groups in societies. Whether urban or rural, whether males or females, whether you know wealthier households within a country of poorer households within a country, let alone by people living with disabilities or in ethnic minority groups and so on. None of this desegregation really started to take place until around 2010 when they began to be collected and disaggregated at global and country levels. A start was made on that around that time. By contrast, the Sustainable Development Goals have as one of their goals the issue of inequalities, different dimensions of inequality. This was a big step forward, but I think it took a lot of debate, convincing if you like ,why this was important to reach the point where not only is there an SDG on inequalities and different dimensions there off, but also there is a commitment that has been included in the Declaration on Sustainable Development and has been reiterated since by the UN General Assembly that no one should be left behind in development process progress and that those groups and those people who are most left behind should be the ones that receive priority in attention by governments. So I think the issue of inequalities is one. The second one as I mentioned was integrating two separate agendas, one that had come out of the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development in the early 1990s and the stream around development goals that culminated in the MDGs and bringing those two together in one agenda was, I think, a major challenge and accomplishment of sustainable developed.

Safa: You mentioned earlier that the MDGs were quite ambitious. Would you characterize the SDGs as also having perhaps some element of ambitious goals to it, because now we’re in 2019. How do you see the progress so far?

Richard: I think the MDGs were ambitious but focused on a quite limited range of issues. Health, education, child survival, poverty reduction, water and sanitation. And so on. The SDGs I think, have everything that was in the MDGs but have added a whole lot of further considerations. So in that sense, I would say the SDG agenda is a more ambitious challenge internationally. In terms of where the biggest challenges are I think you’d very much have to go goal by goal or even within individual goals because in some areas and let me talk about children here — in children’s rights, we’ve seen tremendous progress over 30, 40 years in terms of reducing child mortality, both child death rates among children under five and the numbers of children despite many more births occurring around the world, far fewer children are dying. There is still five million or so to many per year. In terms of school enrolment among children its now much more likely than at any time in the past that at least children of primary school age go to school. But many other challenges remain. Child nutrition is still only improving slowly and that we have twin challenges both of child stunting, stunted growth and obesity merging. So that has a long way to go. I think the quality of basic education is still a massive challenge as recognized by the SDG agenda. It’s not enough that children attend school. They need to learn in a safe and healthy environment and be respected while they are at school. And I think there are further challenges as I’ve discussed for children around the protection from different forms of violence and exploitation and neglect, particularly children who are not living in a family environment or a safe family environment and around participation in the development process. Now you could, I think, extend that analysis specifically on children and look at issues around gender, gender equality, critical issues for the rights of women and non discrimination against women and extend that outwards — particularly an area that, you know, I think has to be now absolutely fundamental to all our efforts is environmental preservation and addressing the stresses and catastrophic impacts on the natural world that we’re having as as human species, and how that is going to increasingly undermine our ability ensure human development in human rights unless we we address it very seriously indeed.

Safa: Absolutely. As you started to accept more positions of leadership when, as you started to work more in the headquarters of organizations, how did your understanding of the bureaucratic nature of international development agencies change? Or what are your reflections on the bureaucracies that that exists in the sector?

Richard: I think bureaucracy is important to have and to write. I’ve tended to think that there can be too little bureaucracy in some organizations as well as, perhaps more commonly, too much. To me it has a lot to do with ethics, and we were talking about ethics before, so this is quite interesting I think that internally organizations need to practise ethics and be clear and consistent that they pursue it among their staff. In other words, staff need to be treated equally and with respect and consideration as a routine and consistent approach. I think organizations to behave more ethically with respect to the outside world — one of the critical challenges, I think for us in international development is the vast power imbalance that exists between organizations which are rich in the sense of they dispose of large amounts of resources, wherever they come from into those organizations, in dealing with and relating to people, families, communities and countries indeed who are poor. That imbalance in the resource availability as between international organizations and local communities and people is the source of much that tends to go wrong, I think, in development and I think bureaucracy is possibly a way that international organizations or their staff hide behind that power imbalance. In other words, they don’t make it easy let’s say for resources to be put at the disposal of the people who really need them. People who should be, you know, able to claim resources whether knowledge or financial or material resources of other kinds. I think we have to be, we have to shape our bureaucracies. That we need to be efficient and accountable in ways that makes it much more easy, easier for us to be held accountable by the people we work for and whose lives we exist as organizations to benefit and whose rights we’re trying to address. We need to have bureaucracies that enable and make it easy and possible for people who are poor to hold organizations, either directly or effectively to account. And I don’t think we have that as sufficiently at the moment by any means.

Safa: On a more personal level, do you have your own code of conduct or ethics that you follow separate to what the organization you were with perhaps believes in, but your own sense of what you think is right and what you have tried to do in your career?

Richard: I’ve tried to work for organizations whose values I I feel like I can embrace so that I don’t necessarily have a separate sense of my sort of ethical position, which is distinctly different from the organization I work for. Again I would stress that I’ve been very fortunate, I think, to find organizations that, at least nominally and officially express sets of values that I can embrace and believe in. My own wish is to embrace issues or principles of justice, equity and respect among human beings. And increasingly as, you know, my to awareness has increased about our impact and our relationship to animals and the natural environment That’s come far too late in my life, I would say, but it’s come least you know further than it was in the past. So I’ve tried to work for ethics based organizations that promote justice, rights, equity and equality and I’ve been lucky to be able to do that I think virtually throughout my career.

Safa: You’ve also had quite a lot of experience working in bilateral and multilateral environments. Do you think that over the years you have had to learn some political savvy skills, some more diplomatic skills in your work?

Richard: I think that I still have a lot to learn when it comes to the politics of development. I’ve never counted myself as somebody who’s finely tuned to those issues. I would always struggle with that. I think one of the approaches that I and other colleagues developed in the children’s rights area is to make a twin appeal and trying to influence decision makers. Really, if we take, for example, you know, a Minister of Finance or a Senior Civil Servant whose involved with budget allocations how would we make the case politically? Let’s say that you know investments, spending on children is a good idea because historically that was very much seen as I said, secondary to economic development, infrastructure in airports, railways, you know, support to industry and agriculture, and so on. That children and health and education and nutrition were a secondary priority. How would we make the case? And I think it’s by a twin appeal, firstly to the fact that children have rights and this has been recognized by almost all governments, although some with reservations, to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. But combine a rights based and ethical argument that you know Children are, you know, have rights and claims on the budget to rates of return analysis on education or why it’s such a good investment that children are going to be the the producers of the future, that economic growth can only come from a healthy, well nourished, well educated and safe population. Therefore, spending on children is, a brilliant investment for the future. So it’s that combination of, as Tony Lake, the former Executive Director of UNICEF used to say: right in principle and right in practice. There are strong, compelling ethical arguments for ensuring children have their basic needs met. And there is strong economic arguments for why this is a brilliant investment for any country, any society and hopefully that combination — if you put that in the right way to a politician or a finance minister, that will win the day or at least lead to some kind of improvement in budget allocations for children.

Safa: Thank you for sharing that — that twin appeal, thank you, that is a great example. Despite agencies or individuals commitment to achieving positive social change and social impact, there are always, you know, mistakes that happen, or programs that don’t work or just in different ways failures that come to be. Could you perhaps tell us of a time, maybe a specific example where you experienced such a situation and what it taught you and what you think you know, people in this industry can do better, do more in terms of learning from and acknowledging failures, so to speak for lack of a better word.

Richard: I subscribe to the idea that we learn more from our failures than from our successes and also that international development in the sense of what we’ve been discussing is very prone to failure and it’s only through experimentation that we will learn and make progress. But I strongly feel, and this is something we haven’t paid enough attention to, that failure mustn’t be at expense off people who are the center of our concerns. In other words, people who have the most to loose because they have the least resources. So I think we have to have a fundamental bottom line in international development of do no harm. We can’t make mistakes at the expense of people who are poor and whose rights are not realized or under threat. Probably then the best way to avoid doing harm where things don’t work out is to listen on a constant basis, to have channel, conversations, spend time with people who are at the center of the development challenge — communities, families, children, young people, women and so on and so on. So I think we have to be close to the ground. We have to understand much better and learn much more about the cultures and societies we are working with and how they operate. And we have to constantly listen to what people are telling us about what’s happening, what’s working, what’s not. This has a number of implications. I think one is that we have to put aside the rush to achieve results. Results may take a long time because of many real and embedded factors in in the societies we are working with. We mustn’t impose ways of doing things. We mustn’t impose demands to demonstrate results on a situation that we don’t well understand and that we are not living through. So I think, artificial setting of results at the expense off processes where we’re listening to people, where people are fully participating and and are enabled to be leaders in their own development — that’s a mistake, and that will lead us to greater failures and to possible harm to different groups of people.

Safa: As you say change takes time and the desire to rush just to have a response or to have a service in place might not be the best reaction in the long term. But when you think of time and the necessity for time and you think about the years of your career, in the past, as you think back, do you feel like a lot has been achieved, or what stands out to you when you think about the last few, perhaps, decades?

Richard: I would just summarize I think some of the things we’ve talked about. Firstly that in my lifetime and in the my career span, children’s rights have been recognized almost universally. They are far from being university realized or implemented or respected in every society. But the necessary step to say we recognize that children have rights and we attach sort of official signatures to that proposition and then to a wide set of rights that have been negotiated and recognized for children, that’s a big step forward. The fact that child deaths are no longer the more common outcome of early childhood but are now increasingly rare in most societies, although not in every part of the world. That’s a historic step. We have never been in a situation where rather than 30% of children dying before the age of five, only 5% of children — I say only because that’s still 5% too many- die of preventable causes. But that’s been an unprecedented achievement in human society. So we said those two and I think that increasingly, where we have an ethic of listening to children and respecting their views and opinions and perspectives, that’s a third. And I think a fourth, I would say that we can now make the call for a far or equal world, one that doesn’t discriminate against women and girls, where equality is a normal and widespread aspiration. That’s also pretty new in human society. So I’d say those are four areas of massive progress. I could give you a much longer list, unfortunately, of various areas where I think we have far more to go, ranging from respect for the environment to LGBT rights and so on. But I would say that the changes in my lifetime have been very exciting and have been cause for hope for the future.

Safa: It’s great that you have that sense of progress and hope for the future. Are there any new approaches or tools or resource that perhaps you’ve come across in recent years that you think are are quite impactful or useful or should be used more generally in the sector?

Richard: There are many and some which I think made a start and then seemed to have been largely abandoned. I’ll give you a couple of examples that come to mind, and I think there are many that I haven’t thought of and I could have thought of. The one is growth monitoring. In the early 90’s there was a push by WHO and UNICEF and a number of governments to introduce the regular monitoring, which means weighing and measuring of children, young children, in clinics and the use of a growth card so that parents could see visually the progress of their children and would know when their children were not growing at the normal rate and be able to do something about it, and I thought this was visually very impactful and also potentially empowering for parents in their child care to be able to see how well the children were growing from month to month through regular low cost weighing in clinic visits. So that’s something I would like to see, revived and perhaps used more widely. The other one I was going to mention in public policy that some tools that have been developed by the World Bank with UNICEF and others to assess the impact of public policy decisions on children across a range of rights and issues so that when we’re looking not only at social development, let’s say, education, health projects and investments, lending decisions but also looking in other sectors. You know, a good one is transport infrastructure. And what do decisions about roads and public transport and, you know, urban design, the geographic design imply for child safety? Let’s say you know, road accidents affecting children and pollution and environmental impacts on on children. So I think these kinds of instruments would look at child impact of public investment decisions, public policy, program design- that kind of thing are also things that are potentially very powerful because very often children are the most affected by these kinds of decisions but these impacts on children are the least appreciated and the least visible and this is a way of making those possible impacts visible.

Safa: Do you have a sense that children are consulted enough or there’s sufficient amount of participation by children in the issues and the policies that affect their lives? I know it’s very hard to generalize, but what have been your experiences with participation of children in these debates and these issues?

Safa: I think far from enough, there is far too little a consultation with children and far too few mechanisms for, as I was saying, the routine and systematic expression by children and young people, including girls and women, of their views, perspectives and experiences. I think this needs to become routine. It requires investment, it requires commitment, it requires attention in not only the international development sector but in all societies, again rich and poor alike. Possibly local government is a good place to start and this is a place where decisions and the process of arriving at decisions in local government can be opened up to children and young people, girls, boys and young adults and also, I would say, national planning. That is something that should be increasingly informed. The difficulty we’ve had — I think we need to move from A to B to C. A is no consultation at all if you like. B is consultation that takes place once or twice within a process, a point in time, but is not routine and it’s not systematic. And I think the point we want to reach at is where those mechanisms are built into society and become the norm. Become expected and become a right that children and young people have to be listened to and heeded. And I think I was going to say, I think school’s practice on and the confidence that children can gain by being participants in decisions in the school environment, through representative councils, through, you know, pupil teacher committees. That kind of thing is a very important learning ground for children and their teachers alike. That’s a place also to make a start on this.

Safa: Yeah, absolutely. On a on a more personal level, has there been a person or situation that has had a very big impact on your career and is there an example of someone who you met even if it wasn’t a superior, perhaps, a child or a situation where you really felt moved by what happened or what you learned? And that has really stuck with you over the years?

Richard: I think I’ll mention two. There have been many people I’ve learned from over the years- at least, I hope I’ve learned from them. I tried to. There was a development thinker called Urban Jonsson, who was one of the leading people in trying to understand what a human rights based approach to development really would mean for the way that we undertake development. The way that we plan, that we assess situations, that progress is monitored and by whom. And I think Urban Jonsson together with other thinkers — Robert Chambers would be another person I followed since I was pretty young in terms of putting poor people first in the development process and how to listen to them rather than impose external views on them. So I think Urban Jonsson, Robert Chambers, where two people I’ve learned from for many decades. The other situation is one where I think I first learned to look at children as people, as whole people, rather than as small adults, if you like, and in a sense, to try to understand their experiences. This was before I had a child of my own, which happened much later. I was 40 when I, 45 in fact, when I had my first child, first and only child, and I’ve learned so much from her. But before that in Mozambique, many children were utilized in military operations and I met a group of children who had come out of a conflict zone where they had played some role. We never really understood what roles in these local conflicts, and I looked into their eyes, tried to engage with a few of them, you know, through my Portuguese, tried to speak with them, and I really saw the trauma that they had been through, these war zones and this move me and I’ve never forgotten that those first encounters with children who had lived through conflict that — I guess these were kids of about 10 years old or so and the way that their faces, their eyes looked, the way they stared, the way they found it so difficult to speak in those situations of brief encounter with them really gave me so much to think about going forward.

Safa: Thank you for sharing that example. As we wrap up here, are there any final points that you would like to make when it comes to ethics and international development or your own personal lived experience, anything you feel like we didn’t touch on, but it is important to think about and reflect on?

Richard: Thanks again, I would just repeat it two of the points, I think, or two of the issues that I’ve mentioned before. One is the importance of putting people whose development we’re concerned about in charge of the development process. We need to enable, empower, we need to listen, we need to understand their contexts and be informed by them of the realities of their lives, otherwise we will make mistakes and do harm. I think that’s one thing I would stress, and we need to take the time to do that, even if it doesn’t fit in preconceived timetables. We need very often to explain this to people who support international development through their donations, through their taxes, through solidarity, that it’s necessary and fundamental to listen to people whose development we’re concerned about and those are the people whose rights we need to respect. So that’s the first one. And I think again, I would reiterate the overriding challenge of the climate crisis, climate emergency that now effects us and we need to find ways quickly and efficiently and smart ways of making sure that we take on board the situation we’re now in as a human species in our relationship with the natural environment and apply that to our work systematically.

Safa: Richard, thank you so much for speaking with us today so eloquently and sharing your knowledge and experiences. It’s being it’s been very enlightening. And we thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Richard: Thanks and it’s a pleasure and greetings to all your listeners.

Safa: Thank you so much. Thank you also to our listeners. To keep up with our weekly podcast please subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Google podcast platforms where you can also rate and review our episodes and share it with your friends. If you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask our future guests, please feel free to email them to us. Thank you so much — I hope to continue this conversation with you all next week. Until then, take care.