At the end of this week, I’ll be stepping down as CEO of Save the Children UK (SCUK). My aim is to spend a bit more time on research and writing on issues that have figured prominently in my work at Save, including child health, education, the protection of children in war, and humanitarian reform. I’m incredibly excited to be joining the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics as a Visiting Professor of Practice. Apart from that, I’m planning to spend more time working on local issues and with organisations I have neglected over the past few years. It’s apparently called a ‘portfolio career’!
Leading SCUK over the past five years has been a privilege beyond words.
Above all, that is down to the extraordinary people who work for the organisation, and to the thousands of colleagues and partners we work with across the world delivering programmes, responding to humanitarian emergencies and advocating for children.
Our founders, the redoubtable Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton, created Save the Children 101 years ago with a single purpose: fighting for child rights. They defied national laws, laid the foundations for universal child rights, and created an organisation that became a global movement. As Eglantyne put it, “every generation of children gives mankind a chance to remake its ruin of a world.” Those words retain a deep contemporary resonance as we confront the great challenges posed by extreme poverty, conflict, climate change and Covid-19.
I have sometimes had to listen to commentators telling the world that aid doesn’t work, and that supporting organisations like Save the Children is a futile gesture. Having visited nutrition clinics in Somalia, Yemen, and north-eastern Nigeria, learning centres in the Rohingya refugee settlements in Bangladesh, programmes supporting the recovery of Syrian refugees, and education programmes in South Sudan, and safety-net programmes across the Horn of Africa, I can assure you that is untrue. There are always lessons to be learned, but Save the Children is an organisation that brings hope and opportunity to people deserving our solidarity - and I leave with a deep sense of pride in our work.
Nowhere is our immediate impact more evident than in humanitarian responses, though the lines between humanitarian emergency and everyday development emergencies are more blurred by the day. Listening to the stories of parents whose children’s lives are hanging in the balance has often been harrowing. But our operations have helped save and rebuild lives in some of the world’s toughest places to be a child – and our programmes have helped create opportunities that would otherwise have been denied to children facing poverty and discrimination. Standing on a football pitch in Jordan watching Syrian refugee girls participating in the programme we operate with the Arsenal Foundation to support their emotional recovery will be a treasured memory (and I say that as a lifelong Tottenham supporter).
This is an organisation with the power to shift agendas by linking programme evidence to national and international advocacy, and partnerships for change.
Back in 2017 we launched a campaign aimed at turning the spotlight on pneumonia, the world’s biggest killer of children. Most of the 800,000 deaths that happen each year are readily preventable through vaccination, simple antibiotics, and oxygen, yet pneumonia remains a neglected disease. Seeing children left literally gasping for breath in clinical facilities lacking oxygen will stay with me not just because of their suffering, but because I struggle to think of a starker human illustration of unjust global health. But change is happening – we have scaled up community health programmes, written national anti-pneumonia strategies with government, won the case for the introduction of PCV vaccines, expanded oxygen provision and forged a coalition that continues to set agendas.
We marked our centenary year in 2019 by launching the Stop the War on Children campaign to challenge the culture of impunity surrounding failures to protect children in war. That campaign went back to our roots in the aftermath of World War I, when our founders challenged the UK’s blockade on humanitarian aid for former ‘hostile powers.’ We worked with school children advocating for the UK to use its Security Council presence to work for a ceasefire in Yemen, and with army surgeons and universities to highlight the challenges posed by blast injuries sustained by children – and we successfully campaigned to get international support for a Safe Schools Declaration.
Part of our role is to leverage the influence of the UK government for international development and children.
That has not always been easy. Our teams played a central role in contesting the appalling decision to cut aid – and it was so encouraging to see NGOs working on development and climate presenting a unified front at the G7 summit. I’m also incredibly proud of our work in addressing child poverty in the UK, including the emergency grants programme we introduced following the pandemic.
A theme that has figured prominently over the last five years is organisational culture. Whoever coined that phrase about ‘culture eating strategy for breakfast’ hit the nail on the head. We have worked incredibly hard to align our organisational culture with our values, learning not just from the circumstances that gave rise to our Charity Commission inquiry, but from independent reviews, and – most important of all – our own people. Strong and resilient organisations have the confidence to look at mistakes, learn from them, and listen to staff experiences. Our Diversity and Inclusion strategy, which I believe will transform SCUK, is the product of sustained engagement aimed not just at understanding systemic discrimination, but ending it. The journey is not yet complete. But there is no turning back.
How we project our mission, talk about our issues, and engage the public matters deeply.
Here too we have not always got it right. We have not been immune to ‘white saviourism’ and narratives that disempower the communities we are there to serve. I have been so impressed by the work of our teams in projecting an organisation that is relentlessly ambitious, but more humble, more open about the challenges we face on the ground, and more honest in acknowledging the weight of colonialism and racism in our society.
When I started as CEO, the world had just adopted the Sustainable Development Goals – which aimed at ending extreme deprivation, extending opportunities, and preventing climate catastrophe – and Save the Children was focused on accelerating the pace of progress. Today, in the grip of a global pandemic, we face a different challenge. The world is on the brink of catastrophic reversals in child survival, nutrition, poverty, and education, while climate action falls far short of the measures needed to achieve the Paris Agreement target.
These are all issues that will figure prominently in Save the Children’s next strategy period.
Faced with a crisis on the scale triggered by Covid-19, we need to unlock the power of international cooperation for children. As a global movement, we responded to Covid-19 by launching the most ambitious campaign in our history and scaling up our programmes in education, nutrition, and child survival. No amount of programming can substitute for the international action needed to support recovery by overcoming the obscene vaccine inequalities now on display, unlocking new resources through the IMF and World Bank, and addressing the climate crisis now unfolding in the lives of the poor.
Of course, this goes way beyond Save the Children’s mission. But ultimately, aren’t we all trying to build a better world for children – and isn’t a focus on child rights a powerful vehicle for reminding the world of our shared humanity? To quote Eglantyne Jebb one more time: ‘the cry of a child is the only universal language’.
Thank you so much for the support, solidarity, advice, and engagement over the past years – and do stay in touch. You can find me on Twitter here.
