Catherine Bertini

Bertini was appointed in 1992 by the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, on the recommendation of President George H.W. Bush. In 1997, she was reappointed with the endorsement of President Bill Clinton, together with that of the Group of 77 developing countries and the Executive Board of WFP.[5]

As chief executive officer of the organization, Bertini transformed WFP into the world's largest and most responsive humanitarian organization. She is credited with assisting hundreds of millions of victims of wars and natural disasters throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In particular, she was widely praised for her efforts to end famine in North Korea; averting starvation in Afghanistan by delivering enormous amounts of urgently needed food aid in 2001; ensuring the provision of food supplies during the crises in Bosnia and Kosovo; and in 2000, averting the mass starvation that threatened 16 million people in the Horn of Africa.[6]

Bertini also led efforts to empower poor women through the use of food aid. In recognition of her leadership at WFP in ending famine and decreasing hunger, she received the World Food Prize, known as the "Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture" in 2003.[5] Rather than accepting the prize money, she established the Catherine Bertini Trust Fund for Girls' Education that provides grants to local organizations that improve access to training and education for women and girls.[7]

She also chaired the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition and served as the Secretary General's envoy twice: for drought in the Horn of Africa and for humanitarian needs in Gaza and the West Bank.[6]

Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Bertini as Under-Secretary for Management in 2003.[6] She was responsible for administering the United Nations’ human, financial and physical resources.

From 2007 to 2009, she served as a Senior Fellow in Agricultural Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[8] She contributed to the development of the foundation’s new agricultural framework, seeking to improve the lives of poor farmers, especially women farmers. She led the first gender initiatives at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.[9][10][11]

Catherine Bertini is a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She helped create and co-chaired the Council's Global Agriculture Development Initiative (GADI) from 2008 to 2013. GADI has been an influential voice in US government circles advocating for new priorities for support for poor farmers within international development programs.[12][13] She also chaired the Council's two Girls in Rural Economies projects, one in 2011[14] and one in 2018[15] and co-chaired the Council's domestic Agriculture Task Force in 2007 and 2012.[2]

From 2017 to 2019 Catherine served as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. Bertini worked on a fellowship project titled "Leadership in Response to a Changing World" which reviewed the international institutions and programs that could help advance humanitarian relief, development, and pandemic response.[16] She published a report titled "Leading Change in United Nations Organizations", which gives guidance to incoming senior management in the United Nations and advice on leading transformational change.[17]

President George W. Bush appointed and President Barack Obama reappointed her to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD), where she advised USAID for nine years (2006-2015) on agriculture and higher education issues pertinent to food insecurity in developing countries.[18]

In 2012, Catherine Bertini was named to serve on the State Department's five-member Accountability Review Board that examined the facts and circumstances of the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.[19][20]

Earlier in her career, Bertini was appointed by Illinois Governor James R. Thompson as a member of the Illinois Human Rights Commission, and as a member of the Illinois State Scholarship Commission.[5]

In 2005, Bertini joined the faculty of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She taught graduate courses in Managing Change in the United Nations, Girl's Education, International Organizations, Executive Leadership, Food Security, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction. She served for one year as Chair of the International Relations Department and one year as the Vice-Chair of the Public Administration and International Affairs Department. She taught at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs for twelve years and in 2018 was named Professor Emeritus.[21]

In 2002, she taught for one semester as Policy Maker in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

In 1986, she taught for one semester as a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.