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Amina J. Mohammed

74 quotes

“I think essentially, we’ve got to have a few conversations with ourselves. And there has to be a huge amount of courage that what you’re doing is shaping the future. I mean, concretely, shaping that future for your people with what you know is the right thing.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And this is our leaders, and I’m saying leaders at different levels, because the leaders that we point to and look to as inspirations and heroes, they’re all gone now. And I don’t know who we point to, to replace them. Because today, we’re so critical of the person, we’re so judgmental of the person, and we miss the message that that person carries.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think people like the Arch and Madiba [Nelson Mandela] always recognized their failings. And so people didn’t have a chance to throw any stones at them. What came out was ‘okay, I’m not perfect, I’m not God, but these are the things that I believe in, these are the things that I will fight for’. So as human beings, what we look to is what they stood for. And I’m not sure today that we give so much grace to leaders. And I think that we have to think and listen to what the leader is saying and doing, rather than judge what’s in the closet.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody’s got a closet, and some worse than others. But if that person takes a good message that does no harm, that brings people together, that forwards Africa, we need to find that community.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have a responsibility as followers to get behind them to do the right thing. So conversation, really serious conversation. Whether it happens in the African Union [AU], and I have to tell you that in the AU, when leaders try to get together to have a closed-door meeting, the international community wants to be in on it.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even I, as an African, say to people, ‘oo, I’m the United Nations’. That’s their conversation they need to have. I can have a private one as well, as a brother or sister conversation to them. But in this piece here, give them space, because every one of them has baggage, and that baggage is colonial. And many of them are tied to it inextricably, and it’s hard.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we’ve been told what to do and what’s good for us. And we have to come back and determine what is good for us. That’s why I said for education, it’s really important we think about that. And we think about what skills are going to put a kid, from when they get into school for 15 years, to the workplace? Is it the skills of tomorrow?”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then you hear what’s going on in South Africa with AI, and you’re thinking, ‘okay, what is the transition going to look like? How do we build that capacity? How do we look at the financial architecture, which was really built for another era, and not for our development – [what about] access courses or even profiting from the natural resources that we have, so that we can build?’ And so it’s going to be complex, because we are many, and our issues are very complex.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We need to think, ‘what is the low hanging fruit for a politician that is bound by a four or five-year cycle of democracy and elective office, to one that is longer?’ Longer term means you need institutional memory; that means that the services the institutions need to be able to carry us through these different cycles of elections.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are so many. Climate for me is the biggest challenge that we have, and opportunity. So when a farmer says to me that this is not about a flood, or temperatures, it’s about I wake up in the morning and my crop is gone because of a dust storm, and that dust storm has come because of drought, and my farm is gone, my livelihood is gone.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those are real stories. They are real situations that have to sometimes find their way into the media, into the headlines. Not so much the misery of it, but the way that we can prevent it and then link that to the 1.5 degrees.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think there’s a disconnect between science, the 1.5 degrees and the reality on the ground. We need to link it, we need to say a third of Pakistan is underwater, because we’ve just had floods that are melting glaciers, and we can tie that to China, and it’s industrial pollution. We can do all this. So how do you tell the story?”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I listened to an elder just three days ago, and his eyesight had gone. And all he said was ‘we’re very grateful for what you’ve been able to give us here, but there’s a lot of people you can’t see that haven’t been able to get to this’. And the first thing he said was women and people with disabilities. And it just made me think, ‘wow, this person right now is not talking about can we have more for me and my tribe’, which is what generally gets into a story, he’s been very specific about the people that are being left behind, that we don’t see.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think he’s given me fodder for my advocacy. Because when I go back into those sterile rooms, that somehow craft language that I don’t understand, and many people don’t understand, we can break it down. And this is where I think the partnership with the media is so important. This is a new partnership that we need to have.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First of all, I think Africa is trying to make those strides that are necessary to achieving SDG 5 (Gender Equality). But the approach to development in Africa has always been ad hoc, and I think we have been pitting some of our greatest challenges against each other in terms of making choices. For example, we will say, Well we have to make a choice between a woman and health. Or a woman and an education budget. And I think this is where we have got it wrong. The fact is that women are an integral part of any investment, be it in health, in education, in agriculture, etc. Africa needs to recognise that our human resources are the biggest asset base that we have, and to ignore investing in 50% of it, is just foolhardy and affects results, as well as the rights that women have in their lives.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The UN’s approach to that, as the secretary general firmly puts it in his vision, is: We have got to look at how we prevent conflicts and once we come out of them, how do we sustain the peace and development. And in the middle of this, we are saying that the SDGs are the frameworks that we need to invest in. There are therefore no quick wins in this discussion. If we are to have sustainable development, we cannot put a band-aid on things. And if you don’t address the root causes, we are never going to have sustainable development. Therefore, we have to go back to the drawing board and we have to be courageous about it; and the UN has to come together and be much more responsive in the way in which it supports countries, in order to move them forward.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But while you are right that we don’t see as many conflicts as before, we do, however, in those pockets, see much more larger scale conflicts, which have larger regional implications. I therefore think it’s much more challenging because they are bringing cross-border issues. Here again, the mechanisms are around putting mediation into place, ensuring that there is a plan straddling the peace process with development. And clearly addressing the fact that when we talk about the humanitarian development nexus, in theory, we have so many red lines. But in practice and on the ground, people are dealing with this in the same context and trying to move the humanitarian crisis to reintegration on a development trajectory that achieves the SDGs. So, it is difficult.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First of all, I think that any population should be seen from the perspective of being an asset to a country and we need to make the investment to make sure there is quality and that everyone has equal opportunity. Today we have populations growing without the ability to service them and therefore, women and children take the brunt of this and are suffering. We have to go back to those policies and see why that is happening. In many cases, it’s because we don’t have the choices around population issues to make those decisions and I think that’s what we should be given, the free choice to make the decisions we need to, to have a healthy family.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think both in the global community and in Africa, we have the right rhetoric, we have the correct framework. But it’s when that rubber hits the road that action comes into play. I think in the case of the AU, what we have seen the African leadership do in the last few months is to, first of all, get behind the reforms that are needed and make them happen, and ask and take the tough questions on how to reform an institution to take responsibility for the decisions that happen to get the results, both in terms of the AU’s Agenda 2063 and Silencing the Guns. We have also seen that they made progress in taking responsibility towards financing the AU itself. These are all works in progress at different stages but I believe the leadership right now is incredibly serious about it and we are redefining our relationship with Africa on the basis of respect and solidarity, as the [UN] secretary general says.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First of all, I think Africa is trying to make those strides that are necessary to achieving SDG 5 (Gender Equality). But the approach to development in Africa has always been ad hoc, and I think we have been pitting some of our greatest challenges against each other in terms of making choices. For example, we will say, Well we have to make a choice between a woman and health. Or a woman and an education budget. And I think this is where we have got it wrong. The fact is that women are an integral part of any investment, be it in health, in education, in agriculture, etc. Africa needs to recognize that our human resources are the biggest asset base that we have, and to ignore investing in 50% of it, is just foolhardy and affects results, as well as the rights that women have in their lives.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Regarding gender-based violence, I believe as a human family, the first thing we have to do is draw up our sphere of tolerance. And then to look at what we need to put in place to ensure that tolerance becomes a sustainable part of our community. In Nigeria, for instance, gender-based violence takes many different forms depending on cultural practices. And there’s been a lot of work that the United Nations has done to overcome some of them. But new incidences are being seen, as we face the complexities of some of the conflicts we have in the northeast, for instance, with Boko Haram kidnappings, the rapes and the sex for food. These are unacceptable but again, you have some gains in other parts of the country where we have greatly reduced some of [the harmful] cultural practices.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So what common ground can they come together on to move us forward? And I think that the fact that we’re seeing no solidarity with Africa right now has actually empowered a conversation. I think the United Nations has been helpful for a sanguine Economic Commission for Africa that did a lot of work with the Minister of Finance. So they were able to take the issues in an international arena and argue them, and it’s quite difficult for our people to do that because essentially, they’re in their own bubble, fighting the day-to-day challenges of broken democracies and an incredibly different set of difficult situations, conflict, etc.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The policy somersaults that we are feeling right now, I guess they feel them in the United Kingdom, they feel them in countries in Europe now that are going so far right from being so far left. So, it’s important, and then I think that, the more we educate people, the better constituencies we have for engaging. You can’t engage with one person, one vote, when there is quite frankly, a lack of education as to understanding why the vote, and what’s my vote worth? Is it $5? Or is it educational reform, and health services, and things that are my rights, that’s what my vote is. So it’s a little bit of a journey, as you know, the long road to freedom – the road is still being tracked.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And then the livelihoods of all these Maasai women and men that I met, their livelihoods, their cattle have died. You see the carcasses on the road. And we don’t want to talk about that much. But that’s assets that have just been taken away. And so when Kenya is dealing with that, they’re saying, ‘okay, right now, the private sector is coming in, and we’re asking them to put a fund together, so they buy the cattle before they die’. So there are resources for that community, for the hard times, and they can replenish stock. Then we have put things together that will help us to build back with a level of resilience.”
Amina J. Mohammed (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source