Noeleen Heyzer, first woman to head ESCAP

Noeleen Heyzer

A champion of women’s rights, Noeleen Heyzer has been appointed Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok, with the rank of Under Secretary-General. The decision by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was announced on 30 July. Ms. Heyzer, a national of Singapore, is the first woman to head ESCAP, which was established in 1947 and is the biggest of the United Nations 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 was the first Executive Director from the South to head UNIFEM. She 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.

Before joining UNIFEM, Ms. Heyzer worked as a researcher for the World Employment Programme of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and was a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. In the early 1980s, Ms. Heyzer had served the Social Development Division of ESCAP, focusing on youth employment and the preparation of the Third World Conference on Women. She was also Director of the Gender Programme of the Asia and Pacific Development Centre, serving as 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.

Addressing ESCAP staff just after assuming office, Ms. Heyzer emphasized that the Commission was situated in a region of great diversity and change. “There is therefore a window of opportunity for ESCAP to be revitalized and positioned as a strategic and critical player in assisting our Member States, the private sector and civil society partners to shape a more balanced and integrated economic and social order in the region...”, she said.

“We can become the region that meets the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, as well as other internationally agreed development commitments”.
She added: “There is relatively little policy and strategic analysis of the comparative experiences of countries, in relation to the numerous economic and social options in the region and their relative successes and failures. ESCAP can fill this niche and play a much stronger role in providing more comparative and critical analysis of experience across countries and of the various policy prescriptions to determine what has been relatively successful, especially in the age of decentralization, globalization and problems without borders”.