Leadership Quote by Kofi Annan

Development, Annan insists, is not a charity project but a design problem - and any design that treats half the population as an afterthought is simply bad engineering. The line’s force comes from its cool, administrative framing: “development strategy” sounds like spreadsheets and policy memos, not moral uplift. That’s deliberate. He translates what could be dismissed as “women’s rights” into the language governments and donors actually fund: outcomes, benefits, social return.

The subtext is a rebuke to the default model of modernization that pays women compliments while sidelining their agency. “Central players” is a hard pivot away from token inclusion. Not beneficiaries, not symbolic hires, not “empowered” in the soft-focus NGO sense - central. In other words, women are not a vulnerable group to be helped; they are an essential power center to be resourced.

The phrase “women and men alike” also does strategic diplomatic work. It preempts the predictable backlash that gender equality is a zero-sum redistribution of status. Annan frames inclusion as collective gain, making resistance look less like principled debate and more like irrational self-sabotage.

Context matters: as UN Secretary-General, Annan operated in a world where gender mainstreaming was becoming institutional policy, yet routinely watered down in implementation. This sentence is a pressure tactic aimed at ministries, aid agencies, and international lenders: if you want legitimacy and results, stop treating women’s participation as a side program and start treating it as core infrastructure.