“I like constantly learning new things”

CHRISTINE WEIGAND

Staff member of the United 
Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF

Christine Weigand has just moved on to a new post again – and travelled several thousand kilometres in the process. She has moved from Madagascar to Iran, from Antananarivo to Tehran, from a desperately poor to a comparatively prosperous country. “That’s exactly what I like doing,” says Weigand, who works for the United Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF, “moving from one country to another, constantly learning new things, being repeatedly exposed to other cultures.” The 38-year-old is now UNICEF’s Deputy Representative in the Iranian capital. Christine Weigand‘s international orientation began early. Besides German, she speaks fluent French, English and Spanish and has a fair command of Dutch. She studied economics abroad and subsequently worked for organisations like the World Bank and the KfW Development Bank. But she has only been able to properly indulge her urge to discover the world and at the same time “do her bit to improve it” since she moved to UNICEF just over four years ago. What drives her is a mixture of idealism and thirst for adventure.

In Madagascar, it was mainly about tackling the huge problem of child poverty and improving the social system by bringing benign influence to bear on the government there. At the time, her job title was Chief Social Policy. In Tehran, her job as Deputy Represen­tative involves more management and representation duties. Her main task in Iran is building trust, particularly in this current period of change. She will probably stay in Tehran for four years – and then move on. But whatever her concrete tasks may be and whatever country she works in in the future, for Christine Weigand her position at UNICEF is “defin­itely a dream job”. ▪