Who is un habitat secretary general

By Medha Basu. Tell us about your role or organisation. Our mandate has evolved over the years, including with the adoption of the New Urban Agenda in Quito, Ecuador in , in which UN-Habitat was given a focal point role in the implementation, monitoring and reporting of sustainable urbanisation issues. What do I mean by urbanisation, you may ask? Urbanisation is a process to provide a better quality of life — either in the city or in the rural area.

Whatever facilities that you have in a city, you should have the same in the rural area to reduce rural-urban migration. In the context of the Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, we were also given the mandate to implement SDG 11 — to make cities inclusive safe, resilient and sustainable.

Globally, we have a presence in 93 countries. My role here is to lead this organisation, as its Executive Director. We just formulated our new vision to provide a better quality of life for all urbanising world. When I joined to UN-Habitat, I inherit an organisation with a lot of challenges, including financial challenges. In terms of using technology, UN Habitat has been collaborating with the Swedish gaming studio Mojang and Microsoft since to develop an innovative community participation methodology that uses Minecraft to co-design public spaces.

To date, about 18, people have participated in the Minecraft project, and about 1. Our experiences show that using Minecraft is a fantastic way of engaging hard-to-reach groups, especially youth in participatory processes. This year in October, in partnership with Colab, we launched the Sustainable Cities Consultation, an innovative online platform that will allow citizens of 5, cities in Brazil to provide feedback on the current state of their city. The results will help guide local authorities and decision makers to create public policies to respond to challenges of urbanization in an efficient and integrated way, from the perspective of the city inhabitants.

We can already report that as of 1st November , 4, citizens have already been engaged in cities. We are proud of this partnership with Colab, a citizen-to-government engagement platform that offers a social network for citizens, focused on issue reporting, urban improvement suggestions and public services evaluations, as well as participation in the decision-making process.

We provide a central repository for users to easily access the necessary information about the rules and regulations that govern this type of misconduct in the United Nations, including steps taken within the UN system to promote gender parity. We provide the necessary information on ways to report such behaviour, to whom and where.

Employees can call or email a hour hotline resource managed at UN Headquarters. With my colleagues and the support of Member States, we embarked on the challenging, yet exciting and rewarding enterprise of reforming UN-Habitat, along four main components:.

First is a reform of the governance and oversight architecture. Second, we are now undergoing a transformative change at UN-Habitat in terms of culture to rethink the i vision; ii impact; iii leadership; iv collaboration; v team; vi systems; and vii funding aspects of UN-Habitat.

The third one is that I am looking into an organisational restructuring to make the organisation lean and fit-for-purpose. And the fourth is the formulation our Strategic Plan , which places frontier technologies and innovations for urban development, as a priority area of work. We were successful in getting Member States to adopt a new governance framework. This is a historical moment for UN-Habitat considering that a new governance structure has been under discussion and negotiation for the past 14 years.

Equally, Member States the UN-Habitat Committee of Permanent Representatives endorsed the Strategic Plan through which we have reshaped the strategic focus of the agency and positioned UN-Habitat well to be a center of excellence and innovation in a changing UN environment. If you were to share one piece of advice that you learned in , what would it be? Well, since the central theme of this year was the reform of UN-Habitat, I have the following pieces of advice for anyone involved in the reform of a major international development organisation:.

On a personal level, my advice is to be humble, always think positively and turn challenges into opportunities. When I started this job, I had no previous experience working in the UN and I just hit the ground running.

All my experience was in Penang and in Malaysia as town planner and Mayor. So I always say to myself that I believe that God sent me to the UN; there must be a reason why and I always think of a positive reason.

She also led a team for the planning and implementation of the Urban Renewal Projects in George Town. She is married and has two daughters. Skip to main content. Welcome to the United Nations. Toggle navigation Language:.