WUNRN
Noeleen Heyzer
Appointed Under-Secretary-General to Head the UN Economic and Social Commission
for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)
30
July 2007
|
|
Noeleen Heyzer has been appointed Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in Bangkok with the rank of Under-Secretary-General. The decision by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was announced today. Ms. Heyzer, a national of Singapore, is the first woman to head ESCAP, which is the biggest of the UN's five regional commissions, both in terms of population served and area covered.
"This is a great honour and an exciting opportunity," said Ms. Heyzer. "The Asia-Pacific region has tremendous development experiences and diversity and I will focus my efforts on bringing a more integrated approach to advancing its social, economic and environmental agenda." Reflecting on her time as Executive Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), a position she has held since 1994, she added: "It has been an enormous privilege to lead such a dynamic organization and to be an integral part of advancing women's human rights and gender equality. It is by now widely recognized that development efforts will fail without empowering women, and I will bring my experience and expertise on gender issues to my position at ESCAP."
Noeleen Heyzer has been the first executive director from the South to head UNIFEM, the leading operational agency within the United Nations to promote women's empowerment and gender equality. Since joining UNIFEM, Ms. Heyzer has worked on strengthening women's economic security and rights; promoting women's leadership in conflict resolution, peace-building and governance; ending violence against women; and combating HIV/AIDS from a gender perspective. She played a critical role in the Security Council's adoption of resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and undertook extensive missions to conflict-affected countries world-wide to ensure its implementation to make a difference in women's lives on the ground.
Through her leadership, UNIFEM has assisted countries to formulate and implement legislation and policies to realize women's security and rights. This has led, for example, to changes in inheritance laws for women, better working conditions for migrant workers, the inclusion of women as full citizens in the constitution of Afghanistan and as full participants in several peace negotiations and electoral processes. Organizationally, UNIFEM has undergone a comprehensive restructuring to maximize performance, build knowledge and partnerships to deliver results. It has also increased its resources five-fold, strengthened its ground presence and successfully advocated to put issues affecting women high on the agenda of the UN system.
Before joining UNIFEM, Ms. Heyzer worked as a researcher for the World Employment Programme of the International Labor Organization (ILO), and was a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She served in the Economic and Social Commission of the Asia and Pacific Region where she focused on youth employment and the preparation for the Third World Conference on Women. She was also Director of the Gender Programme of the Asia and Pacific Development Centre. In this role, Ms. Heyzer was a policy adviser to several Asian governments on gender issues, playing a key role in the formulation of national development policies, strategies and programmes from a gender perspective. She has done extensive work at the community level with women migrant workers, women in the informal sector and in plantations, young women in prostitution, female workers in free-trade zones, rural and indigenous communities affected by environmental degradation.
Born in Singapore, she received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Singapore and a doctorate in social sciences from Cambridge University, United Kingdom. She has received several awards for leadership including the UNA-Harvard Leadership Award, the Woman of Distinction Award from the UN-NGO Committee on the Status of Women, NCRW "Women Who Make a Difference" Award in 2005, and the Dag Hammarskjöld medal in 2004 given to "a person who has promoted, in action and spirit, the values that inspired Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General of the United Nations and generally in his life: compassion, humanism and commitment to international solidarity and cooperation."
================================================================
To leave the list, send your request by email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.