Secretary-General Appoints Laura Londén of Finland Deputy Executive Director (Management) United Nations Population Fund

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today announced the appointment of Laura Londén of Finland as Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director (Management) of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), succeeding Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, to whom the Secretary-General is grateful for her dedicated service and commitment to the Organization.

Ms. Londén brings to the position over 25 years of progressive inter-agency experience at both Headquarters and field duty stations with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the United Nations Office of Human Resources Management (OHRM), the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Ms. Londén’s management expertise includes human resources and financial management, security, logistics and procurement, information technology and enterprise resource planning.  She has strong inter-agency experience and has represented UNRWA on the High-Level Committee for Management and its Security and Human Resources networks since 2007.

Prior to her current position of Director of Human Resources at UNRWA, which she has held since 2012, she was the Agency’s Director of Administrative Support from 2007 to 2012, during which time she also concurrently led the Agency’s enterprise resource planning project for almost three years.  Between 2004 and 2006 she held senior administrative leadership roles in the peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations in Sierra Leone, followed by an assignment as the Chief of Logistics Operations with the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in early 2007.  She has served the United Nations system in several Headquarters and field duty stations including Amman, Freetown, Dili, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Geneva, Vienna, Jerusalem and New York.

Ms. Londén holds a master’s degree in political sciences (public law and administration) from the University of Åbo Akademi in Finland.