Global
Interview conducted by Daria Terenzio from Amref
Dr Adelheid Onyango was appointed Director of the Universal Health Coverage/Healthier Populations Cluster in April 2021. In this role, she provides strategic leadership for WHO’s work with governments, development partners, civil society groups and communities to promote and protect the health and well-being of all population groups in the WHO African Region. This includes developing multisectoral policies and implementing programmes on climate change, the environment and health; social and economic determinants of health; nutrition and food safety; tobacco control and the prevention of non-communicable diseases; and the prevention of violence, injuries and disabilities.
Dr Onyango joined the WHO headquarters in Geneva in 1998. For more than 16 years, she contributed to the WHO’s normative work on child growth and nutrition, generating and translating scientific evidence into normative standards and developing tools and approaches for their application in clinical and public health settings. She moved to the WHO Regional Office in 2014 to lead the Nutrition and Food Safety Programme, where she helped build strong interagency partnerships for nutrition across Africa.
She holds a BA in education from Kenyatta University in Nairobi and a Master of Science and a PhD in nutrition from McGill University in Canada. Her career spans academia, research, and public health policy and programming.