Lakshmi Puri

Ambassador Puri joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1974 and served in Japan, Sri Lanka, Switzerland (Geneva), and as Ambassador to Hungary and accredited to Bosnia and Herzegovina[2]. At the Ministry of External Affairs headquarters in Delhi, she served as the Under-Secretary on the Japan and Korea desk and later as Under-Secretary on the Pakistan desk. She also served as the Joint-Secretary Economic Division and Multilateral Economic Relations (ED & MER) for six years. She was active in conceptualising and negotiating India’s many bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral 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 continued with her trade and economic policy work when 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[3]. She became Acting Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD (2007 to 2009)[4] and steered two major global UNCTAD Conferences: UNCTAD XI in São Paulo and UNCTAD XII in Accra.

From 2009 to 2011, she was Director of the United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States  in New York. She steered the preparations for the 4th World Conference on LDCs in Istanbul and the ambitious Istanbul Program of Action for the LDCs in 2011. She also contributed to the 5-year review of the Mauritius Strategy for the further implementation of the Barbados Programme of Action in 2010 and the Samoa Pathway engendering in 2014

Puri was appointed Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Deputy Executive Director of the pioneering global entity for promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women - UN Women in 2011[5].

She was instrumental in incorporating gender equality in major international agreements like the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals and Financing For Development and other human rights and humanitarian accords. She also promoted imaginative movement building campaigns such as HeForShe and Planet 50/50 with global impact. An innovative campaign involving stock exchanges "Ringing the Bell for Gender Equality" around the world, including New York and Mumbai were also launched successfully under her leadership.

Lakshmi Puri is the recipient of the prestigious Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights[6], Novus Award for Championing the Sustainable Development Goals (Novus Summit), and the Millennium Campus Award 2015[7] .