That statistics are not dry but can make revolutionary change. This was shown when Peter Admson looked at the pioneering work of James Grant at UNICEF.

In 1980, Peter Adamson received a telephone call from James Grant, the newly executive director of UNICEF, asking if Adamson would join him as the editor of the organization’s flagship report titled "State of the World’s Children"? He quickly declined, telling Grant that UNICEF was too fearful of an organization which lacked the boldness to do this kind of communications work. Grant agreed with him and asked him to present on this point.

So began Adamson’s plenary speech at this year’s International Society for Child Indicators in York (2011), which illustrated less his work for the fund than the way Grant had transformed it and, in doing so, saved the lives of three million children a year.

Adamson quickly found that data very much influenced James Grant’s thinking. From the start of his involvement with UNICEF, he poured over the statistics on children in the developing world. He found that while 14 million children were estimated to be dying from malnutrition and disease each year, what really leapt out at him was that the majority of deaths were from a small number of easily preventable illnesses.

Although effective low-cost immunization was available, the statistics again showed that only 15 per cent of children in the developing world were being vaccinated. Surely, Grant concluded , “It is unconscionable for millions to die, and the development of millions more to be undermined from treatable and preventable illness”.

The organization’s new priority, devised by Grant, was then to make vaccines available to almost every child in the developing world. The immunization rate would be effectively doubled to 40 per cent by the mid 1980s and again to 80 per cent by the end of that decade. As then editor of State of the World’s Children, Adamson launched Grant’s grand plan.

The response was, however, overwhelmingly negative. “It's hard to imagine how much a change this was for UNICEF”, Admson recalled. The organization needed to go from the immunization of a few thousand children in developing countries to four or five million each year.

Such a change of direction was, of course, a big gamble for any executive director and it is often forgotten now, but Grant’s position was under real threat in those early years. However, he stuck dogmatically to his statistics, data and public health logic.

The plan was set - UNICEF needed to improve its impact, not incrementally but transform it by over a hundred fold. The fund began to advocate its arguments, backed by the data, repeating it at every available opportunity and, slowly, others started to listen.

Grant’s achievement, however, was more than just making a convincing argument, but making available known treatments to meet the size of the problem. Adamson remarked that “you can’t reach-out at that scale without political will”, and engaging the will of governments and heads of state is where so many other ambitious ideas fail.

Grant’s response was to create the political will, and his tool was always the data about children. Over the years that followed, he tirelessly met with heads of state all over the developing world, opportunities to present the statistics to political leaders who often had no idea of the scale of the problem.

Statistics were important at every step: they identified the issues and solutions, made known the problem and kept track of progress. They were also instrumental in keeping the project’s momentum and the enthusiasm and excitement over what was being done. This led to action starting to take place over the developing world

By the 1990s, the data started to paint another picture, this time of how much had been achieved: 80 per cent immunization targets were met in almost all developing countries. To mention only some of the benefits, by 1995, three million children’s lives were being saved each year, deaths from polio fell from 400,000 to around 100,000.

But that year, James Grant died in a small hospital in upstate New York, having been diagnosed with cancer two years before. To the end of his life he was still advocating international solutions to defeat the plagues that killed children. After his death, tributes from almost every country across the globe were paid, a testimony to one of the great Americans of this century.

Adamson concluded his speech with “Jim Grant’s passion for statistics and his commitment to good data was based on a conviction that all ISCI delegates share: if you what to change something, then you need to measure it”.

Data can have the power to change the world, and change the world James Grant did.

Reference:
Anderson, P. (2011) How child indicators saved 3 million lives, Plenary Speech International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI).