Catherine Andela

Catherine Andela is the Chief of Gender Unit and Senior Gender Adviser in the Department of Peace Operations in the United Nations Headquarters in NY. She brings over 25 years of experience working on protection and gender equality programming in humanitarian and development settings. 

Prior to joining DPO, Catherine Andela was Chief of the MINUSMA’s Gender Unit since June 2019 and worked for a decade as Senior Inter Agency GBV and Gender Adviser across West and Central Africa, Europe and Middle East including Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Yemen. 

Catherine Andela established and headed the Peace, Security & Humanitarian Section at UN Women  West and Central Africa Regional Office in 2013. She also served at OCHA Cote d’Ivoire as humanitarian  coordinator and Head of the information management unit and prior to that worked with OSCE and IOM  in Germany and Switzerland on out-of-Balkan-countries elections, repatriation’s programs and gender  related migration including trafficking. 

Her research and interests are the protection and political participation of women with a focus on peace  processes and gender responsive institutional reforms and the advancement of gender equality. 

Catherine Andela holds a Master’s in Library Sciences & Information Management from Kölner Fachhochschule fur Bibliotheks-und Dokumentationswesen and a Master in Sociolinguistics from the  University of Cologne in Germany.