Global Development: Views from the Center

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week named Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin of Nigeria to be the next executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), replacing Dr. Thoraya Obaid who held the position for 10 years. Dr. Osotimehin is a professor of medicine at Ibadan University. He served a brief time as Minister of Health in Nigeria and supported several controversial global health efforts, including polio elimination and increasing access to treatment for HIV/AIDS.

This post also appeared on the Huffington Post.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday named former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet to head UN Women (full name: UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women), a new UN entity. Congratulations to Dr. Bachelet!

While the selection process was criticized for lacking openness and transparency, I hope that those of us, like me, who have been awaiting this appointment will put that concern behind us and let her get on with the job. In many ways, Michelle Bachelet is the ideal candidate, with the right credentials to make this important new entity function effectively:

This is a joint post with Nandini Oomman.

The White House State Dinner for visiting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tonight is perhaps the biggest social event of the year in the nation's capital. The names of the 400 lucky people who have made it on to the guest list are yet to be released—the list has generated as much buzz as the event itself, both in Washington, DC and in India.

This is a joint post with Molly Kinder.

This week The New York Times Magazine is dedicated to a single theme: women. The main attraction of this special issue is a stirring essay by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who write passionately about the great moral, national security and economic development imperatives of investing in the world’s women and girls. The “women’s crusade” they call for seems already to have begun. A few pages beyond, an interview with Secretary Clinton heralds the start of a “new gender agenda” at the highest reaches of the U.S. foreign policy. Also noted is the growing philanthropic attention to the cause of women and girls – a trend that will be further evidenced next month, when the issue headlines at the annual (Bill) Clinton Global Initiative meetings in NYC.