In Memoriam: Professor Giovanni Andrea Cornia From Isabel "Beatrice" Ortiz, Former Director at the United Nations ILO and UNICEF

It is with great sadness that I learned of the death of a UN hero, Giovanni Andrea Cornia.

I was very young, at university, when I first read his excellent work for UNICEF, “Adjustment with a Human Face,” which has had such an influence on many of us. Andrea and his colleagues, Richard Jolly and Frances Stewart, denounced how international financial institutions and governments were prioritizing debt repayments and “macroeconomic stability” over people, with harmful impacts on children and their families. They made the UN stand up to cold blooded bureaucrats, the IMF, the World Bank, to defend the rights of children and ordinary people.

And again, later in the 1990s, I was surprised by his pioneering and daring work at UNU-WIDER. At that time, no one was talking about inequality in international organizations; there was work analyzing poverty, but inequality was off-limits. Andrea Cornia constructed impressive global statistics and analysis on income inequality in a brave report for UNU. I still wonder how he got this work approved. A real hero. I avidly read the pages of his report from my office in Manila, so far from everything, and I could not help but write him a letter, with deep admiration. To my surprise, he answered. That was Andrea; despite his enormous workload, he responded with a handwritten letter addressed to “Beatrice,” which made me doubt if it was meant for me. And yes, it was – Andrea always had special names for people. He continued calling me Beatrice, and I would smile, thinking he was my Dante.

Over the years, I joined UNICEF to follow in his footsteps and continue his work denouncing austerity after the 2008 global financial crisis. I was fortunate to meet him on many occasions, particularly when we started “Recovery with a Human Face” in 2010,  paraphrasing Andrea’s work with Richard Jolly and Frances Stewart. Andrea gave numerous brilliant lectures, research and advice for UNICEF and the UN, in New York, in Asia, and of course, in Europe, particularly at UNICEF’s Innocenti Institute in Florence.

How sad to know that he has died so young, at only 77 years old. The world has lost a great intellectual hero.