Carlos Lopes, has been appointed by the UN secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as the new Executive Secretary of ECA, the largest UN entity devoted to Africa with around 300 economists and 800 staff, based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Lopes will have the rank of UN Under Secretary General and will be the senior African in the UN leadership when he takes up his duties. His main objective is to enhance African strategic capacity by making ECA the largest think tank in the continent. Lopes has 24 years of UN experience, is fluent in English, French and Portuguese and has vast knowledge of the continent.

Lopes established several institutions, including the main research institute on his home country, and has been associated to major reforms of the United Nations System. At present, Lopes serves on high-level committees of the UN Secretary-General, including the one related to change and reform. Lopes is considered an institutional development and reform specialist.

Lopes worked in the Nordic Africa Institute, served as UN Resident Coordinator in Zimbabwe and Brazil, led UNDP’s Bureau for Development Policy, and served as Political Director for Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Currently he is in charge of two UN institutions for training and research: UNITAR in Geneva and the UN Staff College in Turin. Lopes was the architect of UNDP’s sophisticated global Knowledge Systems. He also led the reflection on capacity building, including co-editing the reference book “Capacity for Development”, with the contribution of Economics Nobel Prize Joseph Stiglitz. For over 4 years he has managed a UNDP project portfolio of about USD 1 billion. Since 2006 Lopes had the rank of UN Assistant Secretary General.

Lopes’ masters on development studies was obtained in the well known Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva. He also has a PhD in African History from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Lopes has published more than 20 books, as an author or organizer, and about 180 academic articles. He has created and is a member of editorial committees of several academic journals. He was the driver of the first Human Development Report of Southern Africa, with a foreword by Nelson Mandela. He has received several awards and recognitions, including two Brazilian orders (Southern Cross and Cultural Merit), an Honorary Doctorate from University Cândido Mendes in Rio de Janeiro and the lifetime membership of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. He is a member of various African institutions and networks, such as CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Sciences in Africa) who gave him special public recognition in 2008 and made him a member of its Scientific Committee. He also integrates the direction of Géopolitiques Africaines, African Sociological Review and African Identities journals.

Lopes is a sought after advisor, currently integrating twelve boards, including the Chair of the General Council of ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute. He organizes several high-level fora, including the Geneva Lecture Series, which counted with the presence of several Nobel Prize winners, including Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. He is frequently invited to be the keynote speaker on such occasions as the Aula Magna of the Polytechnic of Maputo, Luso-Afro-Brazilian Social Sciences Congress, Nordic DevelopmentStudies Congress or the German Association of African Studies Congress, to name the most recent. Lopes taught in important Universities in more than twenty countries, from France to Japan, from Mexico to China, apart from a multitude of African countries.