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World Food Programme - India the food aid arm of the United Nations |
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Catherine
Bertini, the Executive Director's visit to India April 21 - 28 , 2001
Catherine Bertini is the Executive Director of the World Food Programme, the largest global food aid agency. When she was appointed to the post in 1992, she was the first American woman to head a UN organisation and the first woman to lead WFP. Bertini was re-appointed for a second five-year term as Executive Director in 1997. In March 2000, Bertini was named the Secretary-General's special envoy to the Horn of Africa; she immediately embarked on a mission there to avert a drought-induced famine.
From WFP’s headquarters in Rome, Bertini carries out the agency’s dual mandate: to avert starvation in humanitarian crises through emergency operations and to promote long-term development projects aimed at breaking the deeply rooted hunger-poverty cycle. Under her leadership, WFP’s share of global food aid has risen from 22% (in 1993) to 36% (in 1998). The agency’s work is funded wholly by voluntary contributions from governments, non-governmental organisations and the private sector. These donations reached $1.7 billion in 1998, a record for WFP and 1.5 billion in 1999. The number of people receiving WFP food aid rose to 89 million in 1999, the highest in the organisation’s 36-year history.
As WFP’s workload has grown, Bertini has steered WFP into new policy arenas that have produced significant achievements. The agency has underscored the seminal role of women in food aid and pioneered the use of food aid to empower them. Today, few other UN agencies are more strongly associated in their operations with women and gender action than WFP.
Bertini has also put WFP in the vanguard of UN reform. Overhead costs are, on average, 9%, one of the lowest levels in the UN system and comparable to the best-run private charities. With more than 80% of its staff working in the field, WFP has the smallest number of people based at headquarters of any major UN agency. WFP was the first UN agency to establish an Office of Inspection and Investigation, which in its first two years recovered $3.6 million misappropriated in agency operations.
Before she took up her WFP post, Bertini worked in the United States Government. From 1989 to 1992 she was the Assistant Secretary for Food and Consumer Services in the Department of Agriculture. Here, she directed 13 food assistance programmes, which benefitted one in six Americans including 25 million children in more than 90,000 schools. In 1992, Bertini founded the Breastfeeding Promotion Consortium, which saw an increase in the number of nursing mothers in the United States from 38.3% to 50.4% over the next five years.
From 1987 to 1989, Bertini was Acting Assistant Secretary of the Family Support Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services. Charged with implementing welfare reform, she oversaw changes to federal regulations that created educational opportunities for long-term welfare mothers, many of whom consequently entered the job market for the first time. The revised regulations also put greater pressure on absent fathers to pay child support to their indigent spouses.
Previously, Bertini combined a career in the private sector with public service posts in state government. Between 1977 and 1987, she supervised the government relations, philanthropic activities and public affairs of Container Corporation of America. During this period, Bertini was a member of the Illinois Human Rights Commission and the Illinois State Scholarship Commission. Earlier, she was Confidential Assistant to New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and a Legislative Aide in the New York State Senate. Bertini also worked as a volunteer with several youth groups and at a shelter for homeless women.
Bertini, who in 1996 was named by The (London) Times Magazine as one of "The World’s Most Powerful Women", was born on March 30, 1950, in Syracuse, New York, U.S.A. She graduated from State University of New York at Albany and was a fellow of the Institute of Politics in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is married to Thomas Haskell, an international photographer who has donated many of his pictures to WFP.
Bertini has been recognized for her professional achievements through numerous awards. She has received honorary doctorates from the State University of New York (1999), McGill University in Montreal, Canada (1997) and Pine Manor College in Boston (2000). In 1998, she accepted on behalf of WFP the Jordanian Independence Medal of the Second Order, one of Jordan’s highest honours.
Her other awards include the National Association of WIC [Women, Infants and Children] Directors Leadership Award (1992), the American Academy of Pediatrics citation for excellence in Public Service (1991) and the Leadership in Human Services Award from the American Public Welfare Association (1990).
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