Geneva, Switzerland, posting 1 of 2
After 14 years with UNHCR in the field and with a little encouragement from my bosses, I felt I could try to serve at headquarters. I applied and went to work there in the year 2003. With my Programme specialization, I was appointed Senior Programme Coordination Officer (SPCO) in the Programme Coordination and Operational Support Section (PCOS), in the Division of Operational Support (DOS). I did not know at the time how powerful that Section was! My supervisor: Mengesha Kebede, who, as I went to report to duty in his office in Geneva, reminded me that we had crossed paths when he was Field Officer in Ntcheu, Malawi for the 1.1 million Mozambican refugees in 1989. That was the year I joined UNHCR as a National Officer in Tete. In effect, at the time our main warehouses were in Blantyre, and Ntcheu was at the border with Tete anyway. The supervisor of my supervisor in Geneva was Director Marjon Kamara, who had been my Representative in Angola and in Tanzania. And later, Arnauld Akodjenou.
What was PCOS: a pool of experienced senior Programme and Operations experts under the DOS. The Section was responsible for quality assurance of global operations through the following functions:
liaising with the Budget Section (PBS), and the Regional Bureaux. Each one of us was assigned as focal point for each of the Regional Bureaux, in line with the level of knowledge and exposure to the regional operations. I was assigned to the Africa Bureau,
drafting and proposing operational instructions for the field (issued normally by the Director),
keeping the standards and Indicators of global operations up to date and under review,
providing field support in the areas of Planning and Programme Training, as requested by Bureaux.
Preparing documentation for, and serve as the Secretariat to, the Annual Programme Review (APR), which analyzed and approved Annual Plans for all countries around the globe, and
reviewing Bureau new operational resource needs together with PBS, before submitting them to the Operations Review Board (ORB), for approval by the AHC or HC.
1. Support to Bureaux: At this point I learned to read quickly without missing the details. Several times I went into battle with the Bureau I was representing and we created a bittersweet friend/adversary relationship. For 3 years I reviewed submissions and through the reading I came to understand and appreciate the state and challenges of operations in the Continent. It gave me pride because at that time the Africa Bureau represented 40% of the entire Organization’s budget and 36% of its staff. On the other hand, it depressed me to see that most refugees were in Africa, and that 11 of the 17 UN Peace-keeping Operations worldwide were in Africa.
Instructions and Standards and Indicators: these two chapters constitute huge areas of activity and its literature cannot fit in my blog, so I will dedicate one long paragraph to each.
2. Operational Instructions to the field was/is an area where I had real ideological and methodological battles with my own colleagues when I arrived in Geneva, seeing that I had been on the receiving end for all those years. It took time but I managed to convince both my colleagues and our supervisors that there was an excess of instructions, they were too detailed leaving no room for initiative and required a lot of manpower which in the field had two adverse consequences:
senior managers did not read them and just passed them to middle managers to execute. Many staff did not read them either because they trusted that the middle managers would read and alert to anything requiring their attention. And the dominance of the English language was crowding out other UN languages such as French and Spanish, etc; it made English-speakers better at interpreting programme principles than the French colleagues, who had to make double the effort. Ignoring the instruction risked making the programme deficient.
in following the instructions, staff became more intent on the processes and risked focusing on paperwork and feeding the systems, reducing field monitoring and becoming office staff.
This was eventually understood and appreciated by all. The instructions that were more than 20 pages were trimmed down to five or seven. I can claim that battle as mine, but I was not alone by any stretch of the imagination. There is no way one can change a culture single-handedly, especially one that multiplies processes that in turn justify posts.
3. Standards and Indicators: drawing inspiration from the Sphere Standards, UNHCR worked on its own Standards and Indicators dedicated to refugee operations, in many aspects quite similar to those humanitarian standards, but with important differences. I did participate in the process and helped to ensure that this was not just an intellectual exercise but was informed by field realities. In particular, we had fierce philosophical battles with colleagues representing other Continents, where the assistance standards were already much higher than in Africa. Because standards implied fairness in the way resources were to be allocated, to ensure comparable quality of assistance. Our argument (the Africa Bureau and I, the focal point) being that if all human beings should be treated equal, then the refugee assistance standards should not be extremely different in the same organization. A lost battle in practice, but a battle won in the theory. Indeed, while in Africa the refugees remained dependent on WFP food (2,100Kcal/p/d) and received dry rations of cereals, pulses, salt, oil, CSB and little else, refugees in Asia had their daily piece of bread, marmalade and tea in the morning, sugar, meat and vegetables. In Europe they lived in nicely furnished containers, full with kitchen, cutlery and crockery, mattresses, had their ration of meat, milk and pasta. Some of the refugee containers from Europe were sent to house 92 international UNHCR staff in Ngara, Tanzania, upgrading us from our own emergency tents. I knew that because I was part of the Ngara team. Tough talk that raised the awareness of our colleagues in the other parts of the organization. In any case, we (PCOS) managed to issue a comprehensive Practical guide for the use of Standards and Indicators in UNHCR Operations. Once published, we went on a tour of the globe training and building an understanding of these Standards and Indicators and how they w(sh)ould influence our planning and resource formulation process. We went in different directions; I was part of a two-person team sent to Ghana, Guinea and Pakistan.
4. Field Support: Also, a major part of our job description, was to respond to Bureau requests for training and for supporting Joint Planning processes in the field. I have been to various countries supporting this process, such as the DRC, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, of those I can remember. Permit me here a small digression to narrate an important incident:
at that time any air travel over six hours gave UN staff the right to a business class ticket. One year, I took seven donors from Geneva to Guinea (8.5 hours) for a joint planning session with the Representation, and while I was sipping champagne and enjoying caviar in business class of Brussels Airlines, our donors were huddled in economy class. So, as soon as I landed in Guinea, I asked the Representative (Stefano Severe) not to put me on the same return plane with the donors. It made no sense that the beggar is in business class while the financier is riding in economy! I could see the donors looking at me and saying among themselves “oh, so this is what we are asked to finance?” In any case, that business class entitlement has since changed and only applies to flights of nine hours or more.
5. The Annual Programme Review: PCOS was the point of convergence for the preparation of all submissions for the annual programmes received from around the globe, which were discussed between the Bureau Director and the Assistant High Commissioner, and approved by the High Commissioner. This was quite a big process that took one month to prepare, two weeks to go through and two months to communicate to the field. Fortunately, it occurred in April of one year for the following calendar year. However, it was a heavy process that triggered a tight annual operational cycle. Considering the reporting calendars, it kept the field busier with processes more than with substantive monitoring and responding to the needs of refugee welfare and protection. I am told that now the planning is multi-year, which is so much better.
6. The Operations Review Board - ORB
The apex of my learning experience in UNHCR was the process of the Operations Review Board (ORB), where PCOS played a key role as the Secretariat. We scheduled the regular and special meetings of the ORB. Within nine months of arriving in Geneva, I managed to impress the Chair of the ORB with the quality and clarity of report of proceedings and he asked that I become the report-writer. And I did my best not to disappoint. So, with authorization from my Chief every time of course, I was in charge of notifying all parties of the meeting schedules, of the decisions, and of actions that needed to be taken by the Budget Section, the Human Resources Division and other concerned Services.
Who were the members of the ORB and what did they discuss?
Members were: the Deputy and Assistant High Commissioners (chair and alternate Chair), the Controller, Directors of: Budget Section, of the five Bureaux, of Human Resources, of Supply, of Protection, of Division of Operational Support, of Financial Management, of Emergency Management and a few more I have forgotten since. It was a big assembly.
The Secretariat was the obligatory quality assurance pass-through for all global submissions, before any decision was taken. It was responsible for ensuring that all members of the ORB received the full package of documents, including information from the office of the Controller on the financial position of the Organization at that point, at least 3 days before the meeting. That ensured that all could conduct the budget negotiations in the meeting with full knowledge of the financial situation of the Organization. So, most of the time, unless it was an emergency, these meetings were negotiations for the existing resources to meet different field needs in an equitable, transparent and prioritized manner. The process acknowledged the importance of each Director in optimizing the resources of the Organization and in comparing operations. It functioned as a clearing house for decisions of the Deputy High Commissioner/High Commissioner. All senior managers understood the decisions and participated in resource allocation.
In time, both the APR and the ORB strengthened the role of PCOS to a point where some Bureaux asked for modifications in the manner decisions were taken. That was the unravelling of the system, and with it we lost the transparency in decisions on resources allocation. Quality control was shifted to the Bureaux. More and more these resource allocation decisions became the preserve of a few, in line with the centralized nature of UNHCR. While one cannot question that the change made decisions lighter and quicker given the nature of the office, one can certainly see the loss of transparency in allocations, and the difficulty in comparing and reducing glaring differences in standards of assistance across the globe. It is my opinion that its abolition opened the window to a more unequal and less queried resource allocation process, although entirely legit. That created an adverse phenomenon: those senior managers with easy access to donors run to them and influenced decisions in order to get their donations assigned specifically to their geographical area (earmarking in UN lingo).
Lessons
Geneva was a high mark of my career for reasons I cannot possibly exhaust here without becoming boring and pedantic, blowing my own horn excessively. However, I must share a few reflections for the junior colleagues I left behind and who are still finding their foot in the Organization or in the larger UN, particularly those who come from our cultures, the African cultures:
1. Cultural shocks: there are too many cultural particularities out there we need to be aware of and I cannot pretend to exhaust them. That would require that I experienced more of them and they would require a series of articles in themselves. I am not qualified for that. But I will select a few to talk about in this one paragraph. One of them is being on time. Whether you want it or not, you will learn this in Geneva because of two things: the importance of watches in the Swiss economy: not only are they an important commercial item produced in Switzerland, but they literally mean business: if a bus is scheduled at your next stop at say 13H05 min, if you are not there one minute before, you will see it gone by 13H06. Simple. And you will have to wait for the next, and better not be late. I have learned to eat with discipline, first because of cost: a mango that we buy by the bucket here, it is sold one by one in Switzerland and it costs 3 Swiss Francs ($3.3 dollars) a piece. If we are used to eat five to six of them here anytime, be ready to eat half of a mango for lunch and half for dinner! If you are invited for lunch at a restaurant by a group of friends, take your own money and wait for the ceremony of dividing the bill. There is no such thing as a free lunch in Geneva (and probably nowhere in Europe). At one point, I offered to pay for all because I had taken the initiative to invite them (five of them). You should have seen their faces turn into question marks! Another shock was learning to appreciate little spaces, which themselves are expensive, as opposed to my own mansions (after what I saw in Europe, my houses are mansions with full title) in Mozambique or Tanzania!
2. Racial micro-aggressions: these were expressions of racism delivered in various instances in a polite manner from some of my own European colleagues, with discourses that suggested that I was lucky to be accepted to go work in Europe. I resented that and at times I was combative (right reasons, wrong place, wrong audience). I made clear to anyone that I did not see Europe as any prized place, so much so that instead of my 4 years, I only worked 3 and left. Unfortunately, there is racism an a sense of entitlement in the United Nations. That goes all the way to the recruitment and placement processes. African staff in need of placement were perceived as the problem of the Africa Bureau rather than that of their employer, the Organization. Unfortunately, the issue has only aggravated with time. At times I had to say: I was not employed by the Africa Bureau, but by the High Commissioner. Meaning in the end that the High Commissioner could have decided to send me next to Argentina or Germany instead of Kinshasa, where I landed next.
During my time in Geneva, several important donors exerted pressure on the Organization to establish preferential staff quotas for their nationals in line with their financial contribution. Where it ended maybe it becomes a question for somebody else to respond. Nonetheless, staff regulations had been changed in significant ways, such as the introduction of psychometric tests for recruitment. Clearly favouring Europe where psychometry is already a university subject. However, any candidate from Africa was immediately at disadvantage because that is (was) not a subject in our institutions of higher learning. In addition, at one point, progress to a senior position in the career depended on mastering at least two UN languages. Which once more put, for example, the candidate from Spain at advantage, since at university s/he learns in English, but already Spanish, his/her ethnic and national language, is already a UN language!
3. I already stated how big the Africa Bureau was and will not elaborate on that now. What however I will discuss is a personal view of what I consider the distorted way of constituting the Bureaux at the time: The powers-that-be had excised North African counties from the Africa Bureau and placed them in the Middle East - Middle East and North Africa Bureau (MENA). I always considered and still consider separating administratively North Africa from the Continent as an artificial political and ideological project construct. In fact, it has also been adopted by (most likely started by other institutions like) the WB and others. Little wonder then that Morocco felt encouraged and applied to join the EU (was rejected) and Tunisia does not feel entirely African. Egypt feels offended that the civilization of that country is characterized as African, to a point that they do not have the courage to claim the nose of the Pharaoh from the British Museum, because that nose confirms the origins of the Pharaoh (Cheikh Anta Diop). Is this design casual or does it respond to a logic? Is that logic the language, or the Arabism? I feel that this reinforces the division of the Continent and is pernicious. It is of course bigger politics than what UNHCR alone can influence.
Somebody outside the Continent sat in an office and with a sleight of the hand on the map dismissed African history and made us forget that the strongest proponents of a united Africa included Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, Ahmed Bourguiba of Tunisia, Muhammar Khadafi of Libya, Gamal Abdel Naser of Egypt, and not just Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah.
4. Being a Senior Programme Coordination Officer has reinforced the notion I already carried with me: Treat all communications as building blocks of a human relationship. If you initiate powerful communications from a position of seniority, then before you start blaming others for not understanding or complying, read your own instruction back as if you were the recipient, before sending. And by the way, you can draft and keep a communication for a few days before sending. You may come to appreciate the merit of not being precipitous.
5. May I hasten to state that this next statement is a very inaccurate generalization, but let me make it anyways: many Africans in Europe are a traumatized lot. Of course, there are the diplomats, those working in well-paid office jobs and other Africans who have adapted well to life in Europe. But I am talking of those that went there just for a menial job that paid better than any job in their home country, and they are many. It was not my first time in Europe, I had been there as a junior diplomat on a campaign to liberate Mandela, but it was my first time to stay and work there for 3 years. For over one full year, every African looked like my brother and I had the impulse to approach and say hello in buses and trains; I learned to read their personal dramas in their taciturn faces and managed to stop trying to strike a conversation. On a beautiful spring morning, a beautifully dressed and gold-decked African lady from Congo boarded the train without a ticket. Half-way through, the train was raided by the police, who took her aside, fined her 90 CHF ($86) instead of a ticket that would have cost just CHF1.5, and they proceeded to humiliated her in front of everybody and her hapless child. You see, the entry into the bus or train in Switzerland is not checked by anyone and sometimes you could ride it to your destination without paying. You can buy the ticket at the point of entry, or buy one for a week, a month, three, six or twelve months. In winter the police tend not to check the buses, but at any time they board buses and ask for tickets. Such incidents reinforce the need for a self- and community-led discipline we can learn and teach.
6. Importance of remittances is not something I read only in published articles; I saw it myself and it intrigued me profoundly. The first time I saw serious money transfers through Western Union at work was in Geneva. One day I decided to sit at the train station for two hours just observing the traffic of people and trying to extrapolate how much transfer must take place in Geneva alone, let alone in other big cities in Switzerland or entire Europe, or indeed worldwide. In the two hours I sat at the nearby café, I saw no less than 447 persons sending money in three windows to Nigeria, S. Leone, C. Ivoire, Kenya, Pakistan, Brazil, Ghana, Portugal, Serbia, Bangladesh, etc. Suppose: 1. that you shave that number to a round figure of 200/hour; 2. that each is sending just 100 dollars; 3. that we count the working day 08h to 16h (8 hours); 4. that we look at a six-day work week; 5. that movement takes place only in 3 towns in Switzerland; 6. That in each town there is only one money transfer guichet. How much money was being transferred in a month? Do you see the enormity of this extremely minimized picture? $11.5 million/month back then! I sent some money of my own to cousins and uncles in my small town of Tete a few times.
7. Africa being the biggest Bureau in Geneva was a result of the number of refugees and operations in the Continent at the time, aggravated by several emergencies each year. Unwittingly, that reinforced the monochrome generalized perception in (UN)HCR of a struggling Continent. You see where this is going…
8. My personal experience as the filter of submissions of the Africa Bureau created a friend/adversary relationship with a Bureau I was trying to assist. That was the first time I was professionally challenging my own people with a logic that was not part of the African culture. I could see the struggle of my own African colleagues. This is where I learned that being uncomfortable is normal. I learned to `live with, and respect different views. Accepting temporary discomfort and respecting differences means that the other party is not your enemy. Peoples are and must stay different. Do not fight for uniformity, fight for good results.
9. Let me conclude by appealing to my colleagues still mapping their careers, at two levels: (a) You are not employed by a/the Bureau, but by a High Commissioner. So, seek to work also outside the Continent. Of course, the more languages you know, the more opportunities you have. (b) Aim at being placed in Geneva during your career. This is how
I was known in the Organization and stopped being part of an anonymous crowd.
I could build a career and create a “carnet d’adresses” that I could call upon to influence positively the career of other struggling colleagues.
Above all, never forget where you come from. While we die in the Mediterranean to go to Europe, watch the direction of emigration 50 years from now!
Jose, 31 May 2023
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