Born: 1952, India
Died: NA
Country most active: India
Also known as: NA
Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations and the former Deputy Executive Director of UN Women. Prior to her 15 years with the United Nations, she served as an Indian diplomat for 28 years, and was the India’s Ambassador to Hungary and accredited to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based at the Ministry of External Affairs headquarters in Delhi, she served as the Under-Secretary for Japan and Korea, and later as Under-Secretary for Pakistan. She also served as the Joint-Secretary Economic Division and Multilateral Economic Relations (ED & MER) for six years, working on negotiating economic diplomacy initiatives such as the Look East Policy, Indo-ASEAN Dialogue Partnership, Indian-Ocean Rim Association, Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation as well as Group of 15.
She joined the United Nations in 2002 as the Director of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) flagship Division on Trade in goods, services and commodities. After several years, she became Acting Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD (2007 to 2009). From 2009 to 2011, she was Director of the UN Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States.
In 2011, Puri was appointed Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, the pioneering global entity for promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Lakshmi is a published author of several reports and research papers, and has received several awards, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights, Novus Award for Championing the Sustainable Development Goals (Novus Summit), and the Millennium Campus Award (2015).