UN Resident Coordinator meets President before leaving Sri Lanka upon completion of her service

Hanaa Singer, the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations in Sri Lanka, who is leaving upon completion of her service, paid a courtesy call on President Ranil Wickremesinghe on Monday (19).

The President engaged in cordial conversation with Singer and thanked her for the services she had rendered to Sri Lanka and wished her the best of luck in her future endeavours.

Hanaa Singer herved as the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations in Sri Lanka since September 07, 2018.

As the UN Resident Coordinator in Srilanka, Ms Hanaa Singer led a UN Country Team of 22 resident and non-resident UN Agencies. She is the representative of the UN Secretary-General in Sri Lanka.

Ms Singer has worked for close to 30 years across development and humanitarian contexts at various senior management and strategic leadership roles.

Prior to this appointment, she has held several senior management positions in UNICEF offices across the world, including as the Associate Regional Director in Geneva and as Country Representative for Syria, Nepal, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

In Syria, she provided strategic leadership to one of the largest protection crises on the global stage – successfully scaling up programmes through an integrated package of high impact interventions in health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education and child protection - increasing the reach of UNICEF’s work to the most vulnerable children including in besieged and hard-to-reach areas.

As UNICEF chief in Nepal, she pioneered strategic programmes for scaling up sanitation, adolescents and multisectoral nutrition programmes, establishing strategic new alliances resulting in the government adopting national action plans. She has also led humanitarian programmes in Burundi and Haiti, and managed cross border humanitarian operations to Afghanistan and Iraq among other areas and provided technical support to programmes in the North Caucasus, Kosovo, Macedonia, Georgia, Tajikistan and Bosnia.

A national of Egypt, Ms Singer holds a Master's degree in Political Sociology and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She also holds a diploma in “Planning and Management of Decentralized Development Projects” from Bradford University in the United Kingdom.

Ms Singer has engaged in academia and research in political sociology and international relations at the American University of Cairo and at the Sadat’s Academy for Management Sciences, Faculty of Political Science of Cairo University. She is the author and co-author of two publications on social change in the Middle East.