Secretary-General appoints Hanaa Singer-Hamdy of Egypt as the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Mali

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed Hanaa Singer-Hamdy of Egypt as the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Mali, with the host Government’s approval, effective 24 January. She will also serve as Humanitarian Coordinator.

Ms. Singer-Hamdy brings more than three decades of strategic senior leadership experience across development, humanitarian action, peacebuilding and post-conflict settings, with a strong track record in leading large, complex operations and translating global mandates into effective country-level impact. She most recently served as the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Nepal since 2022, after holding a similar role in Sri Lanka from 2018 to 2022. In these assignments, she led United Nations country teams as the Secretary-General's representative for development at the country level, strengthening partnerships with governments and a wide range of stakeholders, and advancing integrated approaches to accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. She also held senior management positions with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), including Associate Regional Director in Geneva and Country Representative in Syria, Nepal, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. In these roles, she provided strategic leadership over multi-sectoral programmes, built high-level partnerships with governments and international actors, and steered complex humanitarian and development operations to deliver sustainable results for vulnerable populations. Her work combined operational leadership, policy engagement and institutional strengthening, ensuring that programmes were both responsive in emergencies and transformative over the longer term. She played a key role in planning cross‑border humanitarian access to reach vulnerable populations during times of heightened instability in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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

She holds a master's degree in political sociology and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and a diploma in “Planning and Management of Decentralised Development Projects” from the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.