Katherine Sierra: First Woman to Chair the CGIAR

The CGIAR is pleased to announce that its 64 members have unanimously endorsed the nomination of Katherine Sierra as their new chair. She is the first woman to occupy this position.

Ms. Sierra is vice president of the World Bank's recently formed Sustainable Development Network (SDN), of which agriculture is an integral component. She succeeds Ian Johnson, who was Bank vice president for Environment and Socially Sustainable Development (ESSD) from 1998 until July of this year.

Ms. Sierra has had a long and distinguished career with the World Bank. She worked extensively on transport and environmental projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, and since the early 1990s has held a series of key management posts, including chief of the Environment and Urban Development Division of the China and Mongolia Department, vice president for human resources and vice president for infrastructure.

In a recent message to CGIAR Members, Ms. Sierra said she felt privileged to have been endorsed as the CGIAR's ninth chair, and she underlined the critical importance of the CGIAR's contribution to sustainable development. "I look forward to working with all of you creatively and productively, and I count on your collaboration and counsel," she said.

"The CGIAR has established an impressive reputation for effectiveness as a catalyst in research for development. This assessment is acknowledged far and wide, especially in those countries where the results of the CGIAR-supported research have made such a difference in the lives of the poor," she added.

The Sustainable Development Network results from a merger, called for by Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, between two previous networks, ESSD and Infrastructure, for which Ms. Sierra served as vice president, starting in 2004.

"Kathy has shown remarkable skill in orchestrating the merger process, and she has gone about it in a thoroughly consultative manner," said CGIAR Director Francisco Reifschneider. "This bodes well for us in the CGIAR, since ours is, by definition, a consultative organization, which can only profit from Kathy's open and collaborative leadership style."

Under Kathy's guidance, the CGIAR will also benefit from close ties with the varied group of global programs encompassed by the SDN," Reifschneider added. These include agriculture and rural development, science and technology policy, natural resource management and social development as well as transport, energy, urban policies and others.