New director for QUNO

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge looks 'forward to working with the new leaders in responding to the new challenges and contributing a perspective from the Global South'.

The South African Quaker Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge has been appointed the incoming director of Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) Geneva. The former government minister from Western Cape Meeting delivered this year’s Salter Lecture at Yearly Meeting Gathering.

Colm Ó Cuanacháin, clerk of the QUNO search committee, said: ‘Nozizwe comes to QUNO Geneva as the first African director of any Quaker international agency. QUNO has always strived for all voices to be heard at the United Nations and in the quiet diplomacy we practice; the issues we work on (climate change, human rights – especially those of migrants, sustaining peace, arms control, just and sustainable economic systems) are particularly important right now to the African continent and to the Global South in general.’

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge said she was ‘grateful and privileged’ to accept the position. ‘I take over at a time of change in the world, new and intersecting global challenges of Covid-19, global warming, deepening economic inequality and polarisation within and between countries… I look forward to working with the new leaders in responding to the new challenges and contributing a perspective from the Global South.’

The outgoing director Jonathan Woolley will be in post until the end of 2021, with Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge expected to start in November.

On announcing the Salter Lecture in 2019, a Quaker Socialist Society member said that after years of campaigning against apartheid, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge was a delegate to the convention that negotiated the transition from apartheid in 1991 and helped draft the new constitution.
‘As a long standing feminist, she helped to ensure that, through the Women’s Charter for Effective Equality, women’s needs were represented in the constitution.’

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