Partnerships Officer in Guatemala

Meet María José Schaeffer, the Partnerships Officer in the Resident Coordinator’s Office in her native Guatemala.  She led the designing of the Financing for Development Strategy for the UN in Guatemala – a first of its kind in the Latin America and the Caribbean region - to increase the UN's capacity to mobilize, leverage, catalyze and align more public, private, national, and international resources to help the SDGs.  

María José coordinated the entire drafting process and content development, drawing on the country context, the existing literature, and the spirit of the UN Reform, to illustrate a more harmonized role of the UN towards the provision of integrated policy advice to help Guatemala achieve its development goals, by ensuring leaving no one behind. The strategy takes the seven action areas of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda as entry points to help identify country-level opportunities in each of these areas to increase financing for sustainable development.  

She also supported the Resident Coordinator Office in strengthening the partnerships with private sector by involving them in the designing process of the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework for Guatemala (2020-2025), and subsequently in its implementation, and by putting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs at the center of their corporate sustainability strategies.