Bio
Susana Malcorra was Argentina’s minister of foreign affairs and worship until July 2017. After her resignation as foreign minister, she became minister advisor to the president until December 2017, presiding over the eleventh WTO Ministerial Conference held in Buenos Aires.
She holds a degree in electronics engineering from the University of Rosario and has 25 years’ professional experience in the private sector (at IBM and Telecom Argentina). Malcorra began her corporate career as a systems engineer at IBM, eventually moving on to become chief executive officer at Telecom Argentina, the third-largest company in the country at the time. Undertaking these responsibilities gave her a deep insight into the management of large organizations, while successfully leading complex change processes.
Malcorra left Telecom Argentina in 2002 after deciding to seek opportunities in the field of non-profit organizations. She succeeded in 2004 by joining the UN World Food Programme. There, she served as chief operating officer, an opportunity to apply her experience and energy to a new cause, superior in meaning and magnitude to what she did in business. In May 2008, the UN Secretary-General appointed her as Under-Secretary-General of the recently created Department of Field Support, where she was charged with providing logistics, communications, personnel and financial support services to UN peacekeeping operations throughout the world.
In April 2012, Malcorra became chief of staff to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Thus, in addition to her long career as an executive, she gained invaluable experience in the diplomatic field, including a range of activities, from handling complex negotiations in various countries (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Somalia, among others), to the approval by the General Assembly of Strategic, Financial and Budgetary Matters involving $9 billion. Among other salient tasks, Malcorra coordinated the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-UN Joint Mission on the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons and the first UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response in West Africa.