Former Portuguese minister Jorge Moreira da Silva is the new executive director of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), replacing Denmark’s Jens Wandel, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced Thursday.
“The Secretary-General of the United Nations today announced the appointment of Jorge Moreira da Silva of Portugal as Executive Director of the United Nations Office for Project Services. The Secretary-General would like to express his appreciation and gratitude to Jens Wandel of Denmark, for his service as acting executive director,” Guterres’s office said in a statement.
According to the note, Moreira da Silva is currently visiting professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and adjunct professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po).
More recently, he headed the Development Cooperation Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris (2016-2022), where he launched a restructuring of this direction with the aim of “stimulating horizontality, cooperation and co-creation”. , the statement said.
As head of the secretariat of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – a multilateral organization within the OECD – Moreira da Silva “enshrined the formulation of new standards of cooperation for development and humanitarian aid,” according to the UN.
Before joining the OECD, Moreira da Silva, graduated in Electrical Engineering (Energy Area), was Minister of the Environment, Spatial Planning and Energy between 2013 and 2015 and full professor at the University of Lisbon, having also held other political positions in the in recent decades a path linked to the Social Democratic Party (PSD).
Between 2003 and 2005 he was State Secretary for Science and Higher Education and State Secretary for the Environment and Spatial Planning. Between 1999 and 2003 he was a member of the European Parliament.
UNOPS is an operational body of the United Nations, whose purpose is to help various partners implement humanitarian, development and peacebuilding projects, in the world’s most complex contexts, through sustainable practices.
Source: DN
