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IOE colleagues remember Victor Tsang: Education, Gender and International Development MA

13 March 2019

Professor Elaine Unterhalter pays tribute to alum Victor Tsang, who lost his life in the Ethiopian Airlines crash on 10 March 2019.

Victor Tsang (UN Environment)

The Centre for Education and International Development (CEID) sends most profound condolences to the family and colleagues of Victor Tsang, our wonderful former student, who taught us more than he learned from us, and whose work on gender and education was unstinting, insightful and a huge testament to his knowledge and commitment.

Victor was a student on the MA in Education, Gender and International Development in 2011-2012. He came to our course having worked for the World Food Programme (WFP), and on graduating worked for a number of UN organisations making important policy and practice connections between gender, education, environment and food. 

As part of his MA studies, Victor wrote an outstanding dissertation entitled ‘The five missing dimensions in the studies of “missing women”: the cases of China and India’. This was a path-breaking work, which examined Amartya Sen’s thesis about missing women looking in detail at demographic information by province and district in India and China. The cogent argument he developed drew on detailed empirical analysis. The dissertation capped a year of study in which Victor had participated with enormous enthusiasm and openness to new ideas. The dedication in his dissertation thanked everyone who had “instructed, supported and encouraged” him on what he described as his journey. His deep interest in that journey was evident in every page of the work.

After his degree Victor kept in touch with a number of us in CEID, letting us know about the work he was doing. He circulated some of the findings from his essays and the dissertation at WFP, where he took up a post as a gender officer. Here Victor worked on innovative approaches to advance gender equality, stressing the in-depth understanding of local contexts. He documented his experiences and the implications for gender policy and practice with great insight. One approach he advocated involved increasing women and human rights awareness during WFP's nutrition training, emphasising the right to health and education.

Moving on from WFP, he took up a post as UN Environment’s Gender Officer, putting his experience and commitment to use in settings working with very vulnerable populations. The theory Victor had studied about gender and lack of access to food was part of his daily work. The gender effects of lack of nutrition were very present to him. He used all his professional and organisational skill to alert the world to these hardships and to make sure the projects UN Environment put in place were attentive to gender patterns, and the ways in which long hours of work, and limited access to food restricted possibilities for women to enjoy education or leisure.

On International Women’s Day in 2018, an article reported on some of Victor’s work on gender in Gwor County, South Sudan. This described the harsh effects of drought on human lives, focussing on one teenager, Mandelena, with a young child. She was only able to find one meal a day, because changing weather patterns meant crops were failing and there were no alternative resources to draw on. The article contained a paragraph which was moving at the time, but is all the more poignant now.

The text ran:

Back in Gwor County, with Mandelena's permission, Tsang holds tight to the young woman's infant boy, Emmanuel. “I looked at him and could not help thinking of my own young son,” says Tsang. “It is this human touch that makes all the data and reports UN Environment produces real.”

Victor always wanted to work as hard as he could to bring about change in some of the harshest places in the real world. He had great skill, energy, and insight. But most of all he had a human touch. It remains with us who taught him and studied with him. In mourning the tragedy of his death, and a journey cut short, we remember with great pride how he kept on encouraging work on gender and education, just as he had promised to in every class.

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