Sumaira Chowdhury

Sumaira Chowdhury is a Partnerships Manager in UNICEF’s Global Philanthropy team in Geneva. She has worked with UNICEF for nearly 12 years, previously in child protection in Mozambique, monitoring and evaluation in India, and district programme co-ordination in Kenya. In what feels like another lifetime, she was a management consultant with A.T. Kearney in New York. Sumaira is a national of Bangladesh. She holds a BA in International Relations from Wellesley College and an MA in International Development from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. As a lifelong traveler, she wishes she could join all the IWitness visits!

Less than a kindergarten, more than a kindergarten

FU Ning, Education Officer for UNICEF China, writes about how UNICEF’s early childhood development programme is educating parents and grandparents to create better opportunities for their children. A volunteer teaches...

4 mins November 23, 2016
Blog

Early Childhood Development turns dreams into reality for parents and their young children in Rwanda

Setting the context On a recent field trip to Miyove, a remote sector in Gicumbi district, I met Claudette Nyirarukundo, a mother of two lovely children. She said that nowadays,...

7 mins October 7, 2016
Blog

Education opens doors: encouraging and inspiring girls in Malawi

Clara Chimwemwe Chindime, Girls Education Officer for UNICEF, explains how education enabled her to achieve her dreams and describes UNICEF’s programme to improve education for all children in Malawi. My...

7 mins September 19, 2016
Blog

Learning a distant dream… UNICEF Angola’s Resident Programme Officer Teofilo Kaingona explains

UNICEF’s larger country programmes maintain sub-national field offices to ensure that we have an in-depth understanding of regional contexts, build close working relationships with local government officials, and monitor programmes...

4 mins March 11, 2016
Blog

From acting on TV to the education stage in Geluksburg… UNICEF South Africa’s Education Officer Lyle Jacobs has quite a story to tell!

On Tuesday 22 February 2016 I will be venturing out into the eastern part of South Africa to the KwaZulu-Natal province. This home to the Drakensburg Mountains and is known...

3 mins February 22, 2016
Blog

Leaving no child behind in Madagascar

UNICEF Madagascar is looking forward to hosting the next group of IWitnesses, who will get to see how our Soft Toys for Education campaign helps children get a quality education....

8 mins December 7, 2015
Blog

Building learning castles in the neediest of places

Thanks to Zhao Qi, we get not only a great physical description of the early childhood development center at Zhongshujie, but more importantly, the joyful spirit that imbues it. The...

6 mins November 16, 2015
Blog

Introduction from UNICEF Ethiopia

Tiye Feyisa has been an education officer at UNICEF Ethiopia since 2008. He currently works in close partnership with the Ministry of Education in areas of quality education and gender...

6 mins October 26, 2015
Blog

UNICEF Angola – welcome Czech, Slovakia and Hungary

Having worked in Mozambique for four and a half years myself, I can attest to the challenges of working in a post-conflict situation. But as you can see in Manuel...

4 mins October 16, 2015
Blog