Tell me about your first choice, UNICEF’s 2010 State of the World’s Children Report, Celebrating 20 years of the Convention of the Rights of the Child.

I chose this report (special edition) on child rights because I think it gives a recent assessment of the progress of children with respect to the Millennium Development Goals and also sets them in the context of the rights of the child. Like my other four choices, it is an action-orientated document with an international perspective. It is not just theory or principles but summarises the specifics of progress with some of the challenges which remain. It is also a document linked directly to the United Nations, which, of course, set the MDGs at the Millennium Summit in September 2000.

And do you think there has been much progress made towards improving the rights of children?

Yes, important and sometimes dramatic progress, as the document brings out. There has been progress directly in implementing the rights of the child, progress in terms of monitoring the rights of the child, progress in terms of the committee which oversees the rights of the child and, at the most specific level, progress in terms of child health and nutrition, access to water and sanitation, and an increase in the number of children in education, particularly girls in schools. In all these areas there has been progress worldwide. So that is the good news.

The report does, however, bring out that this progress has been very uneven. Advance has been most rapid, often ahead of the Millennium Development Goals, in China and in other parts of Asia. Because of China’s quantitative importance in the world this gives an over-optimistic sense of the general progress in the world.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there has been much less progress. There is a very mixed picture in Latin America. It is also interesting that in the Middle East, where countries are often oil-rich, there hasn’t been that much economic progress over the last 20 years.  

However, what I like about the UNICEF report is that it makes clear that, even in countries that are not doing so well economically, it is still possible to make important progress for children. That is what we have seen in the single most important indicator of child welfare – child mortality, the number of children under-five dying each year. This has gone down from about 15 million a year in 1980 to 12 million in 1990 and to just under nine million today. This was made possible by a series of specific actions focused on children – immunisation to tackle child health, expansion of access to water and sanitation actions and, supremely, mobilisation through the media and education to make mothers more aware of the importance of hygiene and how to tackle common diseases such as diarrhoea, and the importance of taking children for immunisation.

Your next choice is another report, UNDP, The Human Development Report 2003: A Compact Among Nations to End Human Poverty.

The Human Development Report is probably the most noticed annual report of the UN, coming out since 1990 and usually getting headline treatment in newspapers around the world. The importance of this report of 2003 is that it concentrated on the Millennium Development Goals and presented them as a compact among nations to end human poverty, particularly a compact between developed donor nations and developing nations.

What I particularly liked and think is so important about this report is that it went into the economic strategy the countries need to follow if they are to make rapid progress towards human development and the Millennium Development Goals. Often there is the idea that mostly what a country needs to achieve the goals is rapid economic growth. This is far too simple – for all the reasons set out clearly and punchily in the summary at the beginning of this report. Elements of national strategy are also clear from the many examples elaborated on in later chapters. So I think it is a very important document and again one that presents specifics on many of these issues.  

The report also supplied evidence to justify a more optimistic picture of past performance of countries in pursuing UN goals. Many people start with a totally negative view about whether it is even possible to achieve the goals and of why countries or people should take seriously goals set up by the UN in New York. What difference will it make?

Well, this report shows that the UN since its early days has adopted some 50 development goals – time-bound targets for economic and social progress. Some – like the eradication of smallpox – have been fully and dramatically achieved, in spite of great scepticism when the goal of eradication was first adopted in 1966. Smallpox was killing two million people a year until the mid 1960s. Yet eradication was achieved in 11 years at remarkably little cost – $300 million in total, the cost at the time of three fighter bombers. This is the most impressive – but many of the other UN goals have had a big impact.

So the goals really are worth pursuing. How about your next book, The No-Nonsense Guide to the United Nations by Maggie Black?

This is a more general book on the UN, written by a friend of mine, Maggie Black. It is superbly done. It is a very lively little book – a good antidote for those who think that the UN must be filled with boring people and boring debates.

It gives you a very good account of the politics but also of the practical impact of the UN.