Jim Grant UNICEF Visionary

This 2014 biography of Jim Grant, UNICEF's executive director from 1980 to 1995, chronicles the child-survival revolution that saved an estimated 25 million lives during his tenure. Edited by Peter Adamson (founder of the Innocenti Report Card series) with contributions from collaborators including Bill Foege and Richard Jolly, it covers Grant's campaign to scale up oral rehydration therapy, universal childhood immunisation, and growth monitoring across the developing world. Grant transformed a UN agency from an advocacy organisation into an operations-driven delivery machine.

"Until I read Jim Grant—UNICEF Visionary, I didn't appreciate what a remarkable visionary and results-driven leader he was," Gates writes. Grant's achievement was operational: he took interventions proven in labs — oral rehydration therapy, a 15-cent treatment for diarrhoea that alone cut child deaths by millions; measles and polio vaccines; vitamin A supplementation — and built the logistics, supply chains, and political coalitions to deliver them in the poorest countries on earth.

For a founder, the book is a case study in execution at global scale. Grant had a single metric (child deaths per year), a small set of proven interventions, and an organisation that initially did none of the delivery work itself. He turned UNICEF into a procurement and logistics machine, negotiated with states that had no health infrastructure, fought dismissive development economists who thought the targets were naive, and produced a measurable decline in the single metric that mattered. It is the closest equivalent in the development world to the operations-first founder story.