Head of Resident Coordinator's Office in Madagascar

Astrid Marschatz Clarke is the Head of the Resident Coordinator’s Office in Madagascar, where she supports the Resident Coordinator’s convening role. Partnering with the European Union and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), she has been instrumental in bringing the UN country team together to organise a series of consultations that gathered representatives of government, donors, civil society and the private sector to reflect jointly, for the first time, on ways to build resilience in the crisis-struck south of the country through greater coordination of humanitarian, peacebuilding and development programming. These consultations resulted in  a joint roadmap that identifies main stakeholders, tools and coordination mechanisms and opened the door to continued multi-stakeholder collaboration in this area. 
 
She is particularly passionate about bringing disability inclusion, gender equality and women’s empowerment front and centre to what the UN does in the country by mobilizing relevant expertise within the UN system and leveraging inter-agency groups on communications, operations and programming to raise awareness and take actions. For example, Astrid has worked closely with the inter-agency Operations Management Team to incorporate disability and gender equality into various common operational practices such as human resources and procurement. She also successfully brought disability inclusion, gender equality and women’s empowerment as key criteria for the selection of joint project proposals.