Biography

Natalia Winder Rossi

Director, Social Policy and Social Protection, Programme Group

Woman wears dark blue jacked and poses in front of lighter blue background.

Natalia Winder Rossi, Director, Social Policy and Social Protection, Programme Group

Full credit must be given.

Natalia Winder Rossi became the Director of Social Policy and Social Protection at UNICEF Headquarters in New York in May 2020. She brings over 20 years of social policy and social protection experience in global and regional roles.

Ms. Winder Rossi leads UNICEF’s social policy programming at the global level and oversees the organization’s work on child poverty, social protection, humanitarian cash transfers, public finance management for children, and local governance. As of 1 July 2020, the team anchors UNICEF’s Global Lead on Urban.

From 2015 to 2020, she led FAO’s Global Social Protection team in FAO, Rome, while acting as Senior Advisor for the Rural Poverty and Resilience and Humanitarian Action Strategic Programmes.

Before joining FAO, Ms. Winder Rossi was the Senior Social Protection Specialist and also Social Policy Advisor (a.i) at UNICEF’s Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa, leading the positioning of social protection as a priority for the region, providing technical guidance to 24 countries, leveraging critical partnerships, while enhancing the work on HIV-sensitive social protection and resilience. She was also a Social Protection Officer at UNICEF Headquarters in New York, where she co-led the development of UNICEF’s first-ever Social Protection Framework. She is the author and co-author of multiple publications, including “From Evidence to Action: The Story of Cash Transfers Impact Evaluation in Sub-Saharan Africa in Africa” from Oxford University Press.

Before starting her career at the UN, she worked for the Inter-American Development Bank as a Social Development Specialist in education, indigenous peoples’ development, and social protection, as well as in the Organization of American States and other national development agencies and civil society organizations.

Ms. Winder Rossi is a national of Peru. She has a Master’s in Science in Foreign Service (International Development) from Georgetown University and a Master’s in Science in Social Policy (Research and Evaluation) from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image release – credit: © UNICEF/UN0796729/McIlwaine. UNICEF photographs are available for use by bona fide news media organizations as part of reports or feature stories on UNICEF. Release permission is hereby granted for this purpose on the following conditions: Image content may not be changed by digital or any other means, except cropping. Image may not be archived in any format or distributed to a third party by any non-UNICEF entity. No other rights than those specified are either granted or implied. Thank you for your interest in UNICEF.