United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today announced the appointment of Ayşe Cihan Sultanoğlu of Turkey as Assistant Administrator and Director of the Regional Bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
She will replace Kori Udovički, to whom the Secretary-General is grateful for her dedication and commitment to during her term.
Ms. Sultanoğlu brings to her new position a wealth of strategic, leadership and managerial experience, as well as an in-depth understanding of the political, economic and social features of Europe and the CIS region. She has been the Director of Human Resources in UNDP?s Bureau of Management since January 2010.
Prior to that, she was Deputy Assistant Administrator and Deputy Regional Director for Europe and the CIS at UNDP headquarters. She worked in a number of countries within the region, including as United Nations Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Belarus, and as United Nations Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Lithuania. In her more than 30-year career with the Programme, she has held a variety of positions at headquarters, as well as in Asia, Africa and the Arab world.
Ms. Sultanoğlu believes the Regional Bureau has been very successful in cooperating with United Nations system agencies and international financial institutions on substantive areas, and has created synergy around common goals, sharing and disseminating lessons learned. She would work to capture that knowledge for UNDP?s transformational change process and to increase its organizational and programmatic effectiveness so that its development impact at the country level is even greater.
She holds a Master?s degree in international affairs from the School of International Affairs at Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Columbia?s Barnard College.
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