Charlotte Petri Gornitzka is deputy executive director of UNICEF, responsible for income, advocacy and communication. Fifteen or twenty years ago, she says, partnership meant income: UNICEF asked the private sector to support its programs and promised the money would be well spent. Child labor in Congolese mining will not be changed by more money, only by companies changing their behavior, so UNICEF now convenes platforms rather than only asking.
Key findings
- The clearest illustration is what she tells pharmaceutical companies offering support during the vaccine effort. The most useful money is a lower price, so the product actually reaches the many children who need it. The better contribution still is investment in the health services a country needs for any vaccine to work long term.
- She calls these tough discussions and admits it is difficult to say no to money when money is a scarce resource. The test is not the size of the offer but whether the partner is open to challenging questions, and whether it would help build a coalition around affordable prices.
- What UNICEF accepts is a foot in a door it believes can be pushed further, rather than a transaction judged on its own terms. Some tests are settled earlier: whole industries are already ruled out, no alcohol and no arms. What remains after that, she says, is judgement.
The homework, described
Asked what a well-prepared company has done, Petri Gornitzka starts with an articulated purpose, reached either from conviction or because consumers and young employees want to work with companies that can state one. The second step is naming where the business itself bears on a problem: an operation that touches child labor, or a product that could be tailored to do good.
The third step is choosing a few goals to lead on. IKEA picked three Sustainable Development Goals, said it wanted to be an action leader rather than a thought leader, and on gender equality shared its own gender policies with other companies. Her summary works as a checklist: purpose, translated into action, then the partnerships those actions need.
Top and throughout, or it will not hold
A partnership has to be supported from the top and embedded in the organization, and Petri Gornitzka says either half alone fails. If only marketing or CSR is behind it, it will be difficult. If only the chief executive is, it can be volatile; she names Paul Polman as the case, successful but resting on one strong leader.
The version she wants to avoid is the one the interviewer names: the chairman’s wife’s favorite charity. When the chairman changes, the charity may change, and she agrees that is not sustainable. The companies she rates are those not afraid to have UNICEF, Save the Children or Amnesty come to a board meeting and say what has to stop.
Nobody knew what it would cost
The most useful admission is about resourcing, and it applies to both sides. Neither the company nor UNICEF knew what the learning platform would take before starting, and both now have many people on it. Partnerships are still underestimated, she says, and her remedy is time spent getting to know each other before the complex work begins.
What that time buys is trust, built by teams that learn each other’s driving forces and by admitting unflattering things. UNICEF is not super speedy, it has bureaucracy, and legal work takes time. The reason it matters is what happens later: something reputational will go wrong, and trust is what lets both sides manage it instead of getting scared.
Two partnerships built rather than funded
The first began with a problem specific to children who move: a child educated in one camp loses everything on moving and starts again. With Microsoft, UNICEF built a learning passport, a platform holding content and certifications a child can carry from one country to another. When schools closed, the same platform was used for children at home.
Her test of co-creation is symmetrical: neither Microsoft nor UNICEF could have done it alone. The same partner built systems for child protection helplines, investing in UNICEF’s support systems rather than handing over money to buy them. That, she argues, is the sweet spot where purposes align, and it is not about looking good with a strong global brand.
Mapping every school before connecting any of them
The second partnership starts from a gap the pandemic widened rather than created. At one point 1.6 billion children were not in school, and UNICEF fears a setback of ten to fifteen years in education. Children in sub-Saharan Africa were already excluded from digital learning, because they were not connected to anything.
The vision is a date and a universal claim: every school everywhere connected to the internet by 2030. Ericsson, which says it is about communicating rather than technology, offered data science expertise and its own technology people for the first step. The two are now mapping schools in 35 countries, so others can fund the connections.
Petri Gornitzka does not present this as charity. Ericsson is investing in its own markets and in communities that can afford services, which is why she expects the work to outlast the moment rather than treating the commercial interest as a compromise. She also marks the limit: connectivity is not the end game, because there still has to be education in the school.
Who the company sends, and who it used to send
Petri Gornitzka’s counterpart has changed. It is now very often the head of sustainability, a role closer to the management team and even the board, where ten or fifteen years ago the contact was marketing and the subject was brands and good association. The larger movement is toward working directly with the business and with R&D.
She then argues against her own trend. Marketing could be more involved, making sure the brand reflects the journey of purpose and helping the head of sustainability do the job. The interviewer’s case is Dove’s Real Beauty work, where advertising billions of dollars had a direct influence on how viewers felt about themselves rather than merely describing a purpose.
Her own precedent is Pampers, whose money and advertising supported UNICEF’s maternal health work. She says the support can be counted at a million children surviving their first year, and calls it a marketing exercise. The task now, she adds, is making purpose embedded in the different brands the way Dove already has.
The account manager is a convener, not an owner
UNICEF runs global account managers, and the role is defined by what it is not. The account manager does not do it all or know it all; the job is to make sure the rest of the organization knows a discussion has started and to bring in the people it needs. The lesson learned is sequencing.
Program people and legal both come in earlier than they used to, because something will always have to be agreed. The remaining gap is internal: partnership skill sits in one part of UNICEF, while the health experts and field staff a company wants to talk to sit elsewhere and need to start thinking partnership. Bring in the whole organization, she concludes, not just the partnership position.
Four things she wishes she had known
Her first lesson is knowing the different missions, because knowing them from the start is what makes expectations manageable. The second is language and process, and she declines to treat the difference as a defect: the two sides are not the same, which is part of the beauty and the reason to partner at all. Misunderstandings still follow.
The third is labor intensity, and she says out loud what it sometimes makes her wonder: whether these partnerships cost more than going out to fundraise. Her answer is that it is worth it when it works, and that both sides should be clear not only about the company’s purpose but about why they are partnering with this company.
The fourth is ambition, and it arrives with an instruction that will jar anyone trained on iterative delivery: aim high together, and do not do pilots. Pressed on it, she narrows the rule to organizations big enough to scale what already exists, and says the opposite applies locally, where UNICEF backs small businesses, pilots and an innovation fund for smaller enterprises.
Where the purpose came from
Petri Gornitzka trained as a music teacher and singer, and her first job was helping adults who had been told to step aside from the choir to sing. Seeing people fulfill that dream told her what drives her, and she draws a line from one person learning to sing to big programs for systemic change for many children.
The turning point was her own family. Raising a son who is autistic showed her how much his outcome depended on being born into a family with resources, even in Sweden, where children’s rights are comparatively well observed. She was humbled and angry at the system, and decided her next job would bring her business experience into Save the Children and the Red Cross.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account of her own organization’s practice, recorded in 2021, and the partnership outcomes she describes are her own descriptions rather than evaluated results. She is candid that several of the shifts she reports are still in progress, both at UNICEF and at other large NGOs, and calls the internal change a journey rather than a completed one.
Source
This page summarises HGS #24: Charlotte Petri Gornitzka (Executive Director, Partnerships, Unicef), by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-17.