Following nomination by the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, the General Assembly, on 7 June 2024, elected Anacláudia Marinheiro Centeno Rossbach of Brazil as Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat).
She succeeds Maimunah Mohd Sharif of Malaysia, to whom the Secretary-General is grateful for her service and commitment to the Organization. The Secretary-General also wishes to extend his appreciation to Michal Mlynár, Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat, who will continue to serve as Acting Executive Director until Ms. Rossbach assumes her position.
Ms. Rossbach, an economist, brings over twenty years of experience working on precarious and informal urban settlements, social housing, and urban policies, as well as designing and implementing strategies for public, social, and private organizations with local, national, and international stakeholders.
She has been the Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy since 2022. From 2014 to 2022, she worked for the Cities Alliance, serving as the Regional Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean, where she supported communities of practice, promoted the transfer and exchange of knowledge and provided advisory services on housing and urban policies in Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Chile and Paraguay, among others. She also led the organization’s Global Programme on Informality in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2005 to 2014, she served as a Senior Housing Specialist for the World Bank, providing technical assistance and facilitating high-level policy dialogue to develop and implement housing in several countries worldwide. This includes Brazil, where she led the design of large-scale housing and the upgrading of informal settlement programmes, and India, Mozambique, the Philippines, and South Africa.
She also worked for the Municipality of São Paulo. She was the founding director of the non-governmental organization Interação, affiliated with Slums Dwellers International, which developed high-impact projects in informal communities in the States of São Paulo and Recife, Brazil.
Ms. Rossbach holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics and a Master of Science in Political Economy from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Brazil. She speaks English, German, Portuguese and Spanish and has an intermediate knowledge of French.
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