Hanaa Singer
Ms. Hanaa Singer-Hamdy is the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka and leads the UN Country Team of 22 Resident and Non-Resident UN Agencies. She is the representative of the UN Secretary-General in Sri Lanka.
Ms. Singer-Hamdy has close to three decades of experience with the UN, working across development and humanitarian contexts at various senior management and strategic leadership roles.
Prior to Sri Lanka, Ms. Singer-Hamdy held several senior leadership positions in UNICEF across the world, including the Associate Regional Director UNICEF Geneva, Country Representative for UNICEF Syria, Nepal, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
In Syria, she provided strategic leadership to one of the largest protection crises on the global stage – successfully scaling up UNICEF programmes through an integrated package of high impact interventions in health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education and child protection - increasing the reach of UNICEF’s work to the most vulnerable children including in besieged and hard to reach areas.
As UNICEF chief in Nepal, she pioneered strategic programmes for scaling up sanitation, adolescents and multisectoral nutrition programmes, establishing strategic new alliances with multiple stakeholders resulting in the government adopting National Action Plans for the first time. She has also led humanitarian programmes in Burundi and Haiti and coordinated UNICEF cross border humanitarian operations to Afghanistan from Central Asia and Northern Iraq from Turkey. She also provided technical support to UNICEF humanitarian programmes in the North Caucasus, and the Balkans and Central Asia.
A national of Egypt, Ms. Singer-Hamdy holds a Master's degree in Political Sociology and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She also holds a diploma in “Planning and Management of Decentralized Development Projects” from Bradford University.
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’s Academy for Management Sciences, Faculty of Political Science of Cairo University. She is the author and co-author of two publications on social change in the Middle East.
