19 August 2009

Bonn, Germany: On 29 July 2009, UNV welcomed its new Deputy Executive Coordinator Naheed Haque, who was appointed by the former UNDP Administrator Kemal Derviş in April 2009.

Ms. Haque joins UNV from Samoa where she served as the UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative for four Pacific Island countries. She succeeds Ms. Joyce Yu, who served as UNV Deputy Executive Coordinator from April 2006 to March 2009.

UNV Executive Coordinator Flavia Pansieri said: “I am absolutely delighted to receive Naheed into the UNV family. I look forward to working together with her and all our headquarters staff and UNV volunteers in the field to deliver on UNV’s mandate.”

Ms. Haque said: “I see tremendous potential for addressing peace and development issues through volunteerism. I want to help the organization and its staff to harness the tremendous potential of the 8,000 UNV volunteers working all over the world every year.”

“I see our volunteers as ‘change agents’ and as the ‘UN’s development corps’,” she continued. “I would like to see UNV strengthen its role as the preferred partner across the United Nations System.  It is wonderful to be chosen for this challenging role and to be able to work with so many committed and hard working UNV staff and volunteers. I am inspired by their work.”

The new Deputy Executive Coordinator sees volunteerism as the “special ingredient” in peace and development programmes. “Through volunteer action, civic change and social mobilization, ordinary people can take their future in their hands, and own it,” she remarked. “It is a way for people to make a sustainable difference in their own communities.”

Beginning in her native Bangladesh, Naheed Haque’s long career with the UN has taken her to Bhutan, Nepal, Timor-Leste and South Africa. She also served in Viet Nam and Iran, and with UNDP Headquarters in New York. There she worked at UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, first as Programme Manager for South Asia and later as Chief of its North-East Asia Division.

One of her most memorable experiences is from her early years as a Programme Officer with UNDP Bangladesh, when she worked with future Nobel Laureate Dr. Mohammad Yunus to help Grameen Bank upscale and replicate its micro-credit work with catalytic funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

She remembers going with Dr. Yunus on field visits to many Grameen Bank locations and training centres, and saw first-hand how Grameen Bank staff were inspiring poor village women to organize themselves for a better life. She says: “That early inspiration has remained a driving force throughout my life and career, and today I am so very happy to be in an organization whose core business is ‘inspiration in action’ for peace and development.”
 
Read the new Deputy Executive Coordinator’s full profile here.