Engineering, development and leadership in Africa

Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)

Engineering, development and leadership in Africa is episode 8 in the new GCSP Podcast Series. Dr Paul Vallet interviews Ambassador Yvette Stevens who represents the great combination of experience and diversity among the GCSP Global Fellowship Initiative with 28 years of International Civil Service with the United Nations and another six as a diplomat for Sierra Leone. Dr Paul Vallet: Welcome to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy weekly podcast. I'm your host, Dr Paul Vallet, Associate Fellow with the GCSP Global Fellowship Initiative. For the next few weeks, I'm talking with subject matter experts to explain issues of peace, security and international cooperation. Thank you to all our listeners for tuning in. The focus this week at the Leadership and International Security Course is Africa, and among the specialists who are giving their insights to the course participants. We have Ambassador Yvette Stevens, who I'm very pleased to also have as a guest on the podcast this week. Ambassador Stevens represents the great combination of experience and diversity among the GCSP Global Fellowship Initiative with 28 years of International Civil Service with the United Nations and another six as a diplomat for Sierra Leone. Original career began as a trained engineer from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute and Imperial College London, which recently honoured her for her subsequent accomplishments. After teaching engineering in university herself, she joined a UN agencies first the International Labour Organization and then the United Nations High Commissioners Office for Refugees in both Geneva and country postings, and later, the United Nations Office of the Special Advisor for Africa. Her final UN function was as the United Nations Assistant Emergency Relief Coordinator and Director of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva from 2004 to 2006. But this was far from over as she then became a freelance consultant on humanitarian issues and disaster risk reduction and also advised the Sierra Leone the government as Energy Policy Advisor. In 2012, she was appointed Sierra Leone his Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, where she worked the full range of issues handled by the UN Agencies here, from human rights to trade and to disarmament. She's also designated a Geneva Gender Champion. So welcome to the podcast, Ambassador Stevens. Ambassador Yvette Stevens: Thank you. Very pleased to be here. Dr Paul Vallet: Well, thank you, for you to join us this morning. Given this remarkably wide experience of yours, my first question to you is, with your engineering background, what are the events and factors that drew you to an International Civil Service and diplomatic career? Ambassador Yvette Stevens: Well, it started a long time ago, I remember as a child, and maybe at age six. And we used to listen, our only contact with the outside world was the BBC Radio. And I used to sit with my uncle as we listened to the BBC Radio. And I imagined this world outside my country, I was growing up in colonial Sierra Leone this world. And I felt I had to be a part of it, but I didn't know how. Later when at school, I was doing well in in maths and physics. And, of course, I decided to do a career in engineering, which was, again, strange for a woman in those days in can imagine the 60s in Africa. But then I got, I was really determined that I wanted to do something you know, especially something that, I could give him and make a contribution to my country's development. So that was how I came back, I'd finished my studies, came back to Sierra Leone,