La enviada de Kerry y Obama que llega a San Salvador

Hoy llegó a Centroamérica la subsecretaria de Estado Heather Higginbottom. Va a visitar Honduras, Guatemela y El Salvador para «ver cómo el gobierno de Estados Unidos está trabajando con los gobiernos y la sociedad civil para mejorar la seguridad, la prosperidad y la institucionalidad democrática», según su cuenta oficial en twitter. Heather Higginbottom es cualquier burócrata, sino una funcionaria my cercana al secretario de Estado Kerry, y de mucha confianza del presidente Obama. Publicamos en Segunda Vuelta su biografía y un artículo de ella recientemente publicado en THE HUFFINGTON POST.

Heather Higginbottom, subsecretaria de Estado para gestión y recursos

Heather Higginbottom

13 octubre 2015 / THE HUFFINGTON POST

Heather Higginbottom was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in December 2013. In her current role, she shares in the global responsibilities for U.S. foreign policy and has broad management and programmatic oversight responsibilities for both the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ms. Higginbottom, the first female to become Deputy Secretary, most recently served as Counselor to the Secretary of State, advising him on policy, personnel, and management issues.

Prior to joining the State Department, Ms. Higginbottom served as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where she was the Chief Operating Officer of OMB and a principal architect of the federal budget. From January 2009 to January 2011, Ms. Higginbottom served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. In that role, she advised the President on a range of education, immigration, and economic development issues – including helping to design the Race to the Top and Promise Neighborhood programs.

Ms. Higginbottom began working for then-Senator Obama in 2007, when she served as Policy Director for the President’s campaign and supervised all aspects of foreign and domestic policy development.

During the 2004 campaign, she served as the Deputy National Policy Director for the Kerry-Edwards Presidential Campaign. After the election, she founded and served as Executive Director of the American Security Project, a national security think tank.

Ms. Higginbottom began her government service in 1999, when she joined the office of then Senator John Kerry as Legislative Assistant. During her years in Senator Kerry’s staff, she handled a wide array of domestic and foreign policy issues, and eventually served as his Legislative Director, overseeing all policy matters.

Prior to her government service, Ms. Higginbottom served at Communities In Schools, a national non-profit organization dedicated to keeping young people from dropping out of school.

Ms. Higginbottom holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Rochester and a Masters degree in Public Policy from the George Washington University.

 

Unlocking Progress with Data. De Heather Higginbottom

Heather Higginbottom con el secretario de Estado John Kerry

Heather Higginbottom, 24 septiembre 2015 / THE HUFFINGTON POST

This weekend, world leaders will convene in New York to adopt new global goals that seek to tackle the world’s most difficult development challenges by 2030. These goals represent an ambitious agenda that aims to end extreme poverty, build inclusive economies, stem the impacts of climate change, achieve gender equality, and ensure that well-governed, peaceful societies are the norm. The United States is proud to join this movement to set meaningful, and measurable, goals that can create a better world — now and for future generations.

Today, we recognize the unprecedented opportunity, and necessity, to come together in partnership around these global goals. More than ever before, we know that partnership between the public and private sectors, civil society, academics, philanthropists and citizens is needed to successfully tackle poverty, build inclusive economies, and address climate change.

And the world is stepping up to the plate. The global-development landscape is drawing more players to the table than ever before. Private capital flows are dwarfing international aid, representing nearly three times the amount of assistance from the United States to developing countries. We also know that lower-income countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, are growing their private and public sectors faster than many advanced economies. And each day, a diverse range of stakeholders are engaged in global development to drive this agenda forward on multiple fronts and make meaningful progress on some of the world’s most pressing issues.

As we embark on this global endeavor, one thing is clear: no single organization, country, or hemisphere, can do this alone. The new global goals are founded on the principle of partnership.

So how do we put partnerships to work for the global goals?

A notable example is taking shape around one of the most central resources needed to make the global goals actionable and achievable: data.

Since the new global goals will be grounded on measurable indicators of progress, data is central to driving implementation, measuring progress, fostering accountability, and ultimately achieving the goals. Data can show us where girls are at greatest risk of violence, and how to prevent it, or where our oceans or forests are being destroyed in real-time, and where HIV/AIDS persists so that we can better target our efforts and end the global epidemic.

But major data gaps exist for each of the global goals. For instance, one in three children under five worldwide has not had their birth registered, which significantly reduces their access to public services and formal employment.

The new Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (Global Data Partnership), launched at the Financing for Development Conference in July, of which the United States is a proud founding partner, will meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, deploying the power of partnership to mobilize a range of data producers and users — including governments, companies, civil society, data scientists, and international organizations — around a common commitment: to harness the power of data and technology to effectively and equitably achieve the global goals.

The Global Data Partnership will leverage new and ongoing efforts to fill these gaps. And not only will it seek to fill gaps, it will facilitate collaboration to address key barriers to data access and use, and will unlock new sources of data to measure and accelerate the goals’ progress.

Stakeholders are already working together to tackle pressing policy questions by mobilizing data in innovative ways. Just last week, data scientists, policy makers, and subject-matter experts collaborated to build solutions to some of the data gaps found in measuring and achieving the SDGs. Together, they focused on how to use geospatial data in conjunction with survey data to map poverty and how to inspire a new generation of data journalists to better communicate the data already being collected.

The global agenda that we will adopt in the coming days will be ambitious, and only by working together can the global community set itself up for success. Our work on data sharing and analyses is one way we are harmonizing our efforts. As we commit to achieve the global goals, we must also commit to forge other new and innovative partnerships to collectively measure progress, fine-tune our efforts, and ultimately overcome the world’s most difficult development challenges. The next 15 years of global development depend on it.

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post, «What’s Working: Sustainable Development Goals,» in conjunction with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The proposed set of milestones will be the subject of discussion at the UN General Assembly meeting on Sept. 25-27, 2015 in New York. The goals, which will replace the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015), cover 17 key areas of development — including poverty, hunger, health, education, and gender equality, among many others. As part of The Huffington Post’s commitment to solutions-oriented journalism, this What’s Working SDG blog series will focus on one goal every weekday in September. This post addresses Goal 17.

To find out what you can do, visit here and here.