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This paper aims at analyzing the UNICEF contribution to the development debate, from the origin of UNICEF after the Second World War to the First UN Development Decade. Starting from the legacies of the interwar period, it will consider the UNICEF contribution to Europe and Asia in the period of reconstruction, then analyze the shift it experienced in its focus on developing countries from the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. The final part of the paper will be devoted to the case of Italy, the second largest recipient country of UNICEF aid in Europe, as a test case of UNICEF's action to spread a new vision of child welfare in Europe and, later, as a feasible experience to be used in the developing world.
KEYWORDS: children, UNICEF, Italy, development, health, nutrition, developing countries.
IN 1947, the development economist Hans Singer, then member of the United Nations (UN) Economic Affairs Department, wrote a study on The Role of Children in Economic Development. He highlighted how undernourishment and poverty could affect economic growth and productivity in those countries, which devoted scanty or no investment to the welfare of children and mothers. According to a view that started to gain credence among development economists at that stage, phenomena like poverty, social deprivation, lack of education, and training stood in the way of successful economic performances and the achievement of new expertise and applications in production. For the first time, Singer's study underlined a nexus between bad economic performances in "developing countries" and bad conditions of childhood, thus suggesting investment in human capital and suitable national programs that considered the needs of children as a top priority.2 Singer's study was conceived when the first stage of the development debate within the UN had just begun and there was no awareness of the link between the care of mother and children and development issues. The report had been requested by Maurice Pate,3 Executive Director of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), established with a temporary mandate in December 1946 to rescue mothers and children in war-torn countries. UNICEF moved from the interwar experiences of the several organizations, which had worked to establish an international network for children and mothers' wellbeing, that is, the League of Nations Institutions...