Following nomination by the United Nations Secretary-General, the General Assembly has elected Ms Anacláudia Rossbach of Brazil as Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), at the Under-Secretary-General level, for a term of office of four years.
Rossbach succeeds Maimunah Mohd Sharif of Malaysia, to whom the Secretary-General is grateful for her dedicated service to the organization. Sharif led UN-Habitat through critical reform years from 2018 to 2024, repositioning the Organization as a thought leader in sustainable urbanization.
Rossbach is currently serving as Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Boston, United States. She is an economist with more than 20 years of experience working on issues of housing, including informal settlements, land, and urban policies. In 2022, she worked on designing institutional and operational strategies to expand access to adequate housing in Peru with the Inter-American Development Bank.
From 2014 to 2022, she was with Cities Alliance, serving as the Regional Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean. In that role, she promoted the transfer and exchange of knowledge and provided advisory services on housing and urban policies in the Global South. She was responsible for establishing the Urban Housing Practitioners Hub (UHPH), a network of experts, practitioners, and researchers working in urban development and housing. In 2020 and 2021, she led the Organization’s global programme on informality as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier, from 2005 to 2014, Rossbach served with the World Bank in Brazil and internationally. She oversaw the development and implementation of Brazilian housing and slum-upgrading policies, including the Growth Acceleration Programme for Favelas and the housing subsidies programme Minha Casa, Minha Vida (“My House, My Life”). As the founding director of the non-profit organization Interação, she developed high-impact projects with informal communities in the state of São Paulo and the city of Recife, Brazil.
Rossbach has contributed to global discussions on urban policies at the Habitat III Conference in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016 and has spoken at all major UN events, including COP and the World Urban Forum. Her academic work includes numerous publications, teaching graduate classes, and professional training courses on housing and urban planning. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Brazil and a Master of Science in Political Economy from the same university.
In its resolution 56/206, the United Nations General Assembly decided to transform the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements into the secretariat of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat).
The Assembly also decided that the UN-Habitat secretariat should be headed by an Executive Director at the level of Under-Secretary-General, to be elected by the Assembly for a term of four years upon nomination by the Secretary-General after consultation with Member States.
