General Assembly confirms appointment of Mukhisa Kituyi of Kenya as next Secretary-General of UNCTADUNCTAD

Mr. Kituyi has a distinguished academic and parliamentary background, coupled with wide-ranging experience in trade negotiations. He will succeed Mr. Supachai Panitchpakdi of Thailand, who assumed the leadership of the organization in 2005 and was reappointed in 2009.

Mr. Kituyi was born in Bungoma District in Western Kenya in 1956. He graduated in political science and international relations, with honours, from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, in 1982. He then studied at the University of Bergen, Norway, at diploma, postgraduate and doctoral level, earning his PhD with a thesis that explored the impact of the market economy on Kenya's pastoral Maasai.

He was elected to the Kenyan Parliament in 1992 and was twice re-elected. He held several senior positions, including serving as Kenya's Minister of Trade and Industry from 2002 to 2007. During this period, he chaired the COMESA Council of Ministers and the African Trade Ministers' Council, both for two years. He chaired the Council of Ministers of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States, and was the lead negotiator for Eastern and Southern African ministers in the EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations. He was also the convenor of the agricultural negotiations at the Hong Kong Ministerial Meeting of the WTO Doha Round. Mr. Kituyi has thus played a major role in both regional and multilateral trade diplomacy.

Mr. Kituyi is Chief Executive of the Kenya Institute of Governance, based in Nairobi, which is a public policy think tank and advocacy organization that focuses on the interface between academic and policy research and the development of public policy. He has also been a nonresident fellow in the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution, and was a resident scholar in 2011.

Mr. Kituyi will begin his four-year term of office as Secretary-General of UNCTAD on 1 September 2013.