Siddharth Chatterjee was recently appointed by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres as the UN’s Resident Coordinator in China, a role he will take up in January. Most recently, he has served as the UN’s Resident Coordinator in Kenya.
Having held leadership positions in various parts of the world with the UN, he has more than 25 years of experience in international development and cooperation.
In this interview with FORBES AFRICA from Nairobi, Kenya, Chatterjee speaks about his new job in the world’s second largest economy, implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and placing human rights at the center of all Covid-19 recovery efforts.
We ask what the world needs at this crucial hour, and he speaks about “strengthening multilateralism as a clarion call”.
A decorated officer in the Indian army before joining the UN in 1997, he is also a proud feminist, having worked towards furthering gender equality in all the countries he has worked in, including some of the conflict-ridden regions of the world such as Somalia and South Sudan, also drawing interesting anecdotes from those experiences. In this interview, he also dwells on how the African continent can realize its full human potential.