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Veronica Kamanga-Njikho is a global leader in child protection, gender equality and women’s empowerment, with more than 25 years of experience shaping international development agendas, driving policy reform and mobilising investment for the rights of women, children and adolescent girls.

Through senior roles with UNICEF and UNFPA across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, she has led multi-country programmes addressing gender-based violence, child marriage and female genital mutilation.

She currently serves as UNICEF’s Senior Child Protection Adviser and Global Lead on Ending Child Marriage. She coordinates the Global Programme to End Child Marriage across 12 focus countries and four regional offices, and co-leads the UNFPA–UNICEF Joint Programme on the Elimination of FGM across 18 countries.

At UNICEF South Asia she led regional strategies for adolescent girls and gender equality, helping grow annual regional funding from US$50,000 to about US$1 million within two years and supporting country offices to mobilise more than US$10 million a year. In her global role she helped secure a US$28 million partnership with the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation to end child marriage in Malawi, Ethiopia and Kenya.

Her humanitarian leadership includes senior UNFPA assignments in South Sudan, Iraq and Uganda. In South Sudan she helped develop a US$30 million joint UN programme on gender-based violence; in Iraq she mobilised more than US$20 million for humanitarian gender and reproductive health programmes.

In Malawi, as UNFPA Programme Specialist for Gender and UN Gender Adviser, she helped secure €12 million from the European Union for a four-year gender programme and chaired the task force behind the 50–50 campaign, as women’s parliamentary representation rose from 14 to 22 per cent in 2009.

Before joining the United Nations she worked with the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, Women’s Voice and Danish Church Aid. She holds a Master of Arts in Gender Analysis in Development from the University of East Anglia, a Postgraduate Certificate in NGO Management from Imperial College London, and a Bachelor’s degree in Education (Humanities) from the University of Malawi’s former Chancellor College.