 ID: 107400
Added: 2007-01-03 10:35
Modified: 2010-10-07 20:13
Refreshed: 2012-02-09 21:13
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Document(s) 7 of 10
Keith Bezanson, an educator and former diplomat, has devoted his entire career to international development. He became IDRC’s third president in 1991, following Ivan Head. Prior to joining IDRC, Bezanson had spent several years working in Africa and Latin America, and had occupied senior positions with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1941, Keith Bezanson began his career in international development in Africa in the mid-1960s. After receiving his BA from Carleton University, he went to Nigeria, where he taught secondary school as a volunteer with the Canadian University Service Overseas (1964-66). During this time, he also worked with the Nigerian Ministry of Education as part of a team in charge of preparing and testing a national curriculum in remedial English for the secondary schools of Western Nigeria. He subsequently worked as lecturer and researcher at the University of Ghana, investigating aspects of cognitive learning in primary and secondary schools. From 1971 to 1973, Bezanson was project director for “The School Leaver Research Project,” which studied the relationship between education and employment in Ghana. As a Ford Foundation Fellow, he received a Ph.D. in education from Stanford University in 1972.
Bezanson joined CIDA in 1973, as chief planning officer. In 1977 he was appointed regional director for Eastern Africa, a post he held until 1978, when he became director general, multilateral programs. As vice-president of CIDA’s Americas Branch from 1981 to 1985, Bezanson was responsible for all aspects of Canadian bilateral cooperation with Latin American and Caribbean countries. He left CIDA in 1985, when he was appointed Canadian ambassador to Peru and Bolivia. Bezanson left External Affairs in 1988 to join the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. He served as the Bank’s administrative manager until he was appointed president of IDRC in 1991.
Bezanson joined IDRC at a turbulent time in the Centre’s history. During his tenure, Canada’s foreign aid spending was sharply reduced and the Centre’s parliamentary grant was cut by approximately 50 percent (in real terms). Under Bezanson’s leadership, IDRC launched a new strategy, Empowerment through Knowledge (1991), which described the Centre’s new structure and outlined the principles and practices that would guide its future work. To this day, IDRC’s mission continues to reflect this philosophy, which promotes a spirit of cooperation and mutual learning among social groups, nations, and societies through the creation, and adaptation of the knowledge that the people of developing countries judge to be of greatest relevance to their own prosperity, security, and equity.
One of most notable aspects of Bezanson’s tenure was the implementation of “program initiatives” (PIs). For the first 25 years of its history, IDRC was structured and conducted its programming along traditional disciplinary lines. In the 1990s Bezanson led IDRC through a transition from this arrangement to PIs, which concentrated the Centre’s work into multidisciplinary teams, each working on a particular development issue. PIs continue to be central to IDRC’s operations.
In 1991 IDRC was listed among 46 federal organizations that faced the risk of being eliminated. Therefore, one of Bezanson’s priorities as president was to prove that IDRC was successful in carrying out its mandate and had a demonstrable impact on developing countries. To demonstrate that IDRC had produced tangible results, the Centre published 101 Technologies from the South for the South in 1992, a booklet featuring technological innovations in agriculture, forestry, energy, and health that were developed in the South through research funded by IDRC.
After six years with IDRC, Bezanson left the Centre to join the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in England, where he served as director from 1997 to 2004. Bezanson continues to be actively involved with different international development organizations.
Document(s) 7 of 10
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