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General: UN-Habitat head Tibaijuka wins sustainable development award

Tanzania’s Dr Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, under secretary-general of the United Nations and executive director of the Nairobi-based housing and urban development agency UN-Habitat, has won the Göteborg Award for sustainable development for her work to improve the urban environment. She says the $147,000 cash prize will be used to support UN agency’s work on behalf of young people living in slums and other sub-standard housing.

Born to small-scale banana and coffee farmers in northwestern Tanzania, Tibaijuka studied at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science in Uppsala. She then pursued an academic career as professor of economics at the university of Dar es Salaam before joining the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva in 1998. In 2002 she was elected as the first executive director of the newly established UN-Habitat agency, the first African woman to head up a UN programme.

Tibaijuka was one of three winners of the Göteborg award, which is considered a sort of Nobel prize for the environment. The others winners were Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, and Sören Hermansen, director of the Samso Energy Academy, who has made the Danish island carbon-free.

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