Privacy Talk with Marielza Oliveira, UNESCO Director for Digital Inclusion, Policies and Transformation, in the Communication and Information Sector: What is your mission at UNESCO?
“This interview recorded on 20th December 2022 is talking about digital human rights and freedom of expression.”
Kohei is having great time discussing digital human rights and freedom of expression.
This interview outline:
- Introduction
- Why did you decide to become involved in this space?
- What is your mission at UNESCO?
Kohei: Thank you for everybody for coming into Privacy Talk. Maybe this is our last time this year. I’m so honored to invite Marielza from Paris. So she’s working on many, many of the very important topics in our society.
She is the UNESCO director for Digital Inclusion, Policies and transformation. So, Marielza, thank you for coming to this interview today.
Marielza: Thank you, the honor and pleasure is all mine. Domo Arigatogozaimashita.
- Introduction
Kohei: Thank you. First of all, I want to share her profile, Dr. Marielza Oliveira (Brazil) is the UNESCO Director for Digital Inclusion, Policies and Transformation, in the Communications and Information Sector. From February 2021 until November 2022 she was Director for Partnerships and Operational Programme Monitoring in the same UNESCO Sector.
From 2015 to 2020, she was Director of UNESCO Beijing, covering the 5 East Asian countries. Previously, she was the global Results Manager (data scientist) for UNDP, where she also held positions as country manager for a portfolio of Latin American countries (2001–2015).
Previous positions also include Systems Engineer at the US Army Construction Engineering Research Lab/USA Corps of Engineers (US, 1987–1991, where she was responsible for AI systems development), senior consultant at Fundacao Dom Cabral (Brazil, 1995–1999), and Director of Executive Education at Ibmec Business School (2000–2001).
Dr. Oliveira holds a Master of Science in Finance (1990) and a Ph.D. in Business Administration (1995) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.
So it’s a pleasure to have a call at this moment.
Marielza: Thank you very much,the pleasure is mine.
Kohei: Thank you. So I’m quite delighted to start the conversation about the interview. At the beginning, I’m very interested in your activity because you are concerned with many of the International affairs all over the world. So could you tell us why you started your own history and why you decided to be involved in space.
Marielza: Thank you very much. As you presented me, you probably thought that I have a very different background than most people expect from a United Nations staff, you know, usually people think that we are all experts on development or we are working on international relations, that kind of background.
However, I come from the private sector with a master’s in finance and a PhD in business, had long experience doing that working for government in Brazil as well as in the US. What really drove me towards the United Nations was the mandate, you know, and particularly the idea that you can really help people amd ensure that they have a higher quality of life; you can contribute to improving the life conditions for poor people.
That’s a passion that I had;, an objective that I had, after I gained some experience in the private sector, in government and even in academia as a head of business school. That’s When I found that I could apply my new skills to help improve people’s lives, working in the UN system as well. And the fact that I had a unique background helped me very much, since I could address some issues that were not exactly being addressed to the extent needed.
You know, when I joined the UN, that was in 2001 — so many, many years ago, actually 22 years ago to be exact. And, at the time, one of the first projects that I started working on was the fiscal modernization of Brazilian states helping to modernize the tax collection system because there was quite a lot of evasion and quite a lot of uncollected taxes.
If you don’t have to collect taxes, if you don’t have the public resources to offer education, health, justice and all the public services that people need. So that was one of the ways that I started to contribute.
And I remember when I left that post to go to New York (because I started in Brazil and then moved to New York City at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Program) I was driven around by a secretary of state of finance, who showed me:
- Why did you decide to become involved in this space?
“Do you see that hospital? Do you see that road? Do you see that school? They were build with the resources we gained due to improvements in the tax collection system, and we are now able to offer, a better education to millions of additional students. That was really moving, and fulfilled my dream of being able to help in many ways.
Later I went to UNDP in New York, , and now I work at UNESCO, which has a fantastic, incredible mandate of building peace, through education, through science, through communications, through culture. Working for the UN has is been a lifelong dream for me. Thank you for the question, which brought many good memories for me.
Kohei: That’s impressive. I’m also very curious that you chose your own career in finance. Is there any reason why finance is quite an interesting part of you?
Marielza: Finance was an interesting subject for me, because actually, it required, a lot of very strong quantitative skills and programming skills. I had those, but it wasn’t a matter of matching the skill set I had with other interests I had.
I was interested in understanding different systems, such as, economic systems: how they could work better, how they impacted society. And in influencing those systems, in doing research on how financial management, and macro finance interventions can affect social economic goals, was something that was interesting to me.
So that’s why I moved into that field and got a master’s. But afterwards I realized that I needed deeper skills, you know, a better understanding of the social psychology aspects , and thus I next took a PhD in business. I also took extensive coursework in cognitive science, so my PhD degree ended up being half in Business and half in Cognitive Science.
While doing it I fell in love with the idea of artificial intelligence systems, and started learning to program them. So that’s a skill set that I developed naturally, progressively. I ended up being invited to work as a software engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, where I refined these skills,and then I returned to Brazil as a consultant, working in the private sector.
ButI really wanted to continue looking at social implications, not just market implications.
I wanted to contribute to society as a whole, not to the profits of a particular company When the opportunity came, I really jumped at that and never regretted it.
It was the best thing I’ve ever done. While the salary is not as attractive as that of a consultant in artificial intelligence in the private sector, to me it was much more satisfying. I’m very happy that I made this career move.
Kohei: That’s a very unique career. Since you changed the position but you combine it the more practical way that’s been a good reference for the listeners to how they develop the skills, experiences, enhancing the level of the achievement, the your skill.
So yeah, thank you for sharing that. It’s been a very good experience. So I think now you work at the UNESCO, I think the UNESCO, there are many projects. They are organizing, so could you tell us your missions, the UNESCO. What are you working on at this moment?
- What is your mission at UNESCO?
Marielza: Okay, well, UNESCO, as you said, it’s an incredible organization and the objective of UNESCO, the mandate, the raison d’etre as they say in French, the Organization’s Reason to exist is to build peace in the minds of men and women.
That’s in the first paragraph of the UNESCO constitution. And we do that by, promoting the free flow of ideas, by word and image. Of course, we promote he free flow of good ideas, the good ideas that flow through education, through culture, through scientific exchanges, and through communications and information sharing.
In UNESCO, I have a very specific role. As you mentioned in the beginning, I’m the Director in the Communications and Information (CI) Sector that addresses digital transformation, digital Inclusion, and digital policies. T Communication and Information sector of UNESCO is the area that protects and promotes the rights to freedom of expression and access to information in all its forms, as well as the right to privacy.
Supports countries in building, human rights-based digital transformation. This is important because all countries are passing through this huge technological transformation, which impacts everyone, but this technological transformation may not be including everyone equally
As a result digital divides happen. There are two types of divides, essentially. One is about connectivity. Not everybody is connected to the internet, and even people who are connected to the internet may not necessarily, have what we call meaningful access to information: they may lack the smart devices, they may lack affordable data packages, or the ability to express themselves in their own languages on digital platforms.
For example, there are 7061 languages in the world, and only around 200 are active on the internet, so many people cannot even have an email with their own name in their own language.
Some of the things that UNESCO CI does in order to strengthen access to information is to support countries, institutions and digital platforms, to to develop appropriate policies for meaningful internet access.
The second type of digital divide is about capacities. The capacities of countries and institutions, for example, to implement and enforce good policies, and good regulations, that enable people to enjoy free expression as well as access to information, online and offline.
That also includes the capacities of individuals to derive socioeconomic value from their meaningful internet access You live in a country that is highly technologically savvy and capable. But that’s not true of all countries in the world.
In many countries, people don’t really have capacity to fully benefit from access to digital information, not only because of weak connectivity, but also because they lack the skills, the media and information literacy,, or knowledge for that.
Therefore Institutions, even institutions that are actually ministries of IT, need help in this fast changing technological environment to enact the policies and programs that enable their citizens to really enjoy the human rights to expression and access to information
But these rights are extraordinarily important nowadays, because people spend so much time online, sometimes as much as offline. For example, digital learning, remote working, social media interactions, has become the norm. And digital public services too.
But, for example, digital access to education or justice requires a citizen to have meaningful access to digital systems. The same for digital health, which can enable people from places that don’t have good health systems locally, to actually have access to additional types of health services. The same is true for people to benefit from, jobs online.
So, it’s really important that people have the full capacity to derive social economic value from being online, — not just being online for the sake of it, but really, that they can be online to learn, to engage with other people, to enjoy access to enhanced public services, and so on.
That’s why the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO is so relevant. It contributes to building the capacities of countries, individuals and institutions, so that everybody can enjoy their rights to access to information and freedom of expression and privacy.
Kohei: That’s pretty amazing work. I think that human rights is very important to distribute to the internet to all then accessing on the internet. I think it’s a very primary action, especially for developed countries to really work for those kinds of rights, responsibilities.
And I think AI, Artificial Intelligence is our future, especially for digital societies because AI will support our society so work and in life. But I think that AI has some of the important aspects such as how the AI decides any decisions, and also how this AI will determine our life.
In this case, I think our ethical approach to ethical decisions is very significant. For more stakeholders, could you tell us how UNESCO works on AI and ethics, then what is the important point of this issue?
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