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.

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