The Flow of UNESCO Experts toward Latin America: On the Asymmetrical Impact of the Missions, 1947?1984

ANABELLA ABARZÚA CUTRONI

A history of UNESCO. Global actions and impacts

Palgrave Macmillan

Año: 2016; p. 181 - 197

In this chapter, we seek to identify some of the asymmetries in the impact of UNESCO missions in Latin America. Not all the states in this region had access to the same number of experts for technical assistance; the thematic orientation of the missions was not homogenous in all the countries and at the scientific level, certain disciplines received more attention than others. These asymmetries provide insight into the difficulty of efficiently implementing the UNESCO programme at the national level during its first twenty years of activity and reveal the significance of the support of the member states. In the first section, we will analyze how technical assistance for development was implemented by the UNESCO officers. We describe the United Nations Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance in order to then analyze the distribution of experts sent on missions by states worldwide during the period studied (1947-1984). In the second section, we focus on the impact of the UNESCO missions in Latin America to establish which member states of this region received the greatest quantity of experts; the thematic orientations of the different missions and the scientific disciplines that benefitted the most. In the third and final section, we briefly describe the case of mathematicians sent on a mission to Argentina to give classes at the UNESCO Regional Centre for Mathematics in Buenos Aires from 1959-1964.