Helen Clark - United Nations Development Programme

United Nations Development Programme

Helen Clark became the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme on 17 April 2009, and is the first woman to lead the organization. She is also the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues. The current government of New Zealand strongly supported her nomination, along with Australia, the Pacific Island nations and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown. She also received the support of the five countries on the UNDP board (Iran, Haiti, Serbia, The Netherlands and Tanzania) and was unanimously confirmed by the General Assembly on 31 March. She was officially sworn in by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 27 April 2009.

In this position, Forbes deemed her the 61st most powerful woman in the world.

In an interview with New Zealand news agency 3 News on 5 March 2012, she confirmed she would be seeking another four year term as Administrator of the UNDP.

Read more about this topic:  Helen Clark

Famous quotes containing the words united nations, united, nations, development and/or programme:

    “The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”
    —Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)

    “We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
    —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)

    “Intimately concerned as we are with the system of Europe, it does not follow that we are therefore called upon to mix ourselves on every occasion, with a restless and meddling activity, in the concerns of the nations which surround us.”
    —George Canning (1770–1827)

    “Sleep hath its own world,
    And a wide realm of wild reality.
    And dreams in their development have breath,
    And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.”
    —George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)

    “The idealist’s programme of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.”
    —Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)