UNIFEM New York -- Noeleen Heyzer has been appointed Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in Bangkok with the rank of
Under-Secretary-General. The decision by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
was announced today. Ms. Heyzer, a national of Singapore, is the first
woman to head ESCAP, which is the biggest of the UN's five regional
commissions, both in terms of population served and area covered.

"This is a great honour and an exciting opportunity," said Ms. Heyzer.
"The Asia-Pacific region has tremendous development experiences and
diversity and I will focus my efforts on bringing a more integrated
approach to advancing its social, economic and environmental agenda."
Reflecting on her time as Executive Director of the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), a position she has held since 1994,
she added: "It has been an enormous privilege to lead such a dynamic
organization and to be an integral part of advancing women's human rights
and gender equality. It is by now widely recognized that development
efforts will fail without empowering women, and I will bring my experience
and expertise on gender issues to my position at ESCAP."

Noeleen Heyzer has been the first executive director from the South to
head UNIFEM, the leading operational agency within the United Nations to
promote women's empowerment and gender equality. Since joining UNIFEM, Ms.
Heyzer has worked on strengthening women's economic security and rights;
promoting women's leadership in conflict resolution, peace-building and
governance; ending violence against women; and combating HIV/AIDS from a
gender perspective. She played a critical role in the Security Council's
adoption of resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and undertook
extensive missions to conflict-affected countries world-wide to ensure its
implementation to make a difference in women's lives on the ground.

Through her leadership, UNIFEM has assisted countries to formulate and
implement legislation and policies to realize women's security and rights.
This has led, for example, to changes in inheritance laws for women,
better working conditions for migrant workers, the inclusion of women as
full citizens in the constitution of Afghanistan and as full participants
in several peace negotiations and electoral processes. Organizationally,
UNIFEM has undergone a comprehensive restructuring to maximize
performance, build knowledge and partnerships to deliver results. It has
also increased its resources five-fold, strengthened its ground presence
and successfully advocated to put issues affecting women high on the
agenda of the UN system.

Before joining UNIFEM, Ms. Heyzer worked as a researcher for the World
Employment Programme of the International Labor Organization (ILO), and
was a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of
Sussex. She served in the Economic and Social Commission of the Asia and
Pacific Region where she focused on youth employment and the preparation
for the Third World Conference on Women. She was also Director of the
Gender Programme of the Asia and Pacific Development Centre. In this role,
Ms. Heyzer was a policy adviser to several Asian governments on gender
issues, playing a key role in the formulation of national development
policies, strategies and programmes from a gender perspective. She has
done extensive work at the community level with women migrant workers,
women in the informal sector and in plantations, young women in
prostitution, female workers in free-trade zones, rural and indigenous
communities affected by environmental degradation.

Born in Singapore, she received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of
Singapore and a doctorate in social sciences from Cambridge University,
United Kingdom. She has received several awards for leadership including
the UNA-Harvard Leadership Award, the Woman of Distinction Award from the
UN-NGO Committee on the Status of Women, NCRW "Women Who Make a
Difference" Award in 2005, and the Dag Hammarskjöld medal in 2004 given to
"a person who has promoted, in action and spirit, the values that inspired
Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General of the United Nations and generally
in his life: compassion, humanism and commitment to international
solidarity and cooperation."


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UNIFEM is the women's fund at the United Nations. It provides financial
and technical assistance to innovative programmes and strategies to foster
women's empowerment and gender equality. Placing the advancement of
women's human rights at the centre of all of its efforts, UNIFEM focuses
its activities on reducing feminized poverty; ending violence against
women; reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and girls; and
achieving gender equality in democratic governance in times of peace as
well as war. For more information, visit www.unifem.org. UNIFEM, 304 East
45th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10017. Tel: +1 212-906-6400. Fax: +1
212-906-6705.