Wednesday 3 March 2010

An honest voice: Kristalina Georgieva's blog

It is not natural that high level politicians keep their natural voice, but the new EU Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva seems to prove the contrary in her new blog.

Georgieva has served as World Bank vice president before being nominated as EU Commissioner last month after her colleague Jeleva was rejected by the European Parliament.

She has only written three post so far, reporting from her visit to Haiti, but she has clearly chosen a very human tone. Georgieva doesn't ignore the politico-organisational questions that are part of her job but her posts don't sound like masked press releases.

Here are two quotes from the latest post, in which she explains the humanitarian action on the ground while keeping an eye on the human beings around her:
The humanitarian action in Haiti is organized in 12 thematic clusters (shelter, nutrition, health, logistics etc) under the overall leadership of the Humanitarian Coordinator of UN. The system aims at grouping different organizations to make their job more effective and avoid redundancies.

[...]

Later in the afternoon I visited the camp of Jacquet Toto, built on a slope by a large waste dump. The camp is at high risk of sliding downhill when the heavy rains start. Kids play on the top of the waste mountain and it is clear that neither the kids nor the tents should be there. Camps like this are not only against human dignity, but they are also extremely dangerous.
I am very positively impressed, and Kristalina Georgieva is definitely part of the women who run the EU (blogosphere). I hope she continues in that direction and if yes, her blog might become a flagship of the new European Commission.

And maybe Catherine Ashton can learn something from this kind of communication in order to get out of her partially self-made bad publicity...

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