Ms. Adele Khodr is a national of Lebanon. She has done her studies at the American University of Beirut, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Public Administration and a Masters in Social Anthropology.

Ms. Adele has been working with UNICEF since 1990. With close to 30 years of service in UNICEF, Adele brings strong and dynamic leadership skills and strategic management experience combined with a deep understanding of UNICEF’s work in both emergency and development contexts across four of UNICEF’s seven regions. Her foundation expertise is in child protection.

She started her career in UNICEF Lebanon, and then moved to UNICEF Sudan where she headed the Child Protection Section from 2002 to 2005. After that she moved to the UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia where she worked on child trafficking. She then served as Deputy Representative in Sierra Leone, West Africa from July 2006 to November 2008. Her work involved development, formulation, coordination and monitoring and evaluation of the country programme for UNICEF with special focus on child survival and education.

Ms. Adele moved in 2008 to UNICEF India Country office to head the largest UNICEF field office, namely in Uttar Pradesh, serving a population of 200 million persons with a focus on polio eradication, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene and child protection with special focus on child labor. She conducted policy dialogue and advocacy with the state government and other partners for enhancement of child rights and women in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Ms. Adele worked as UNICEF Representative to Cote d’Ivoire between October 2013 and April 2016. She headed an office with about 110 staff, with specific attention to child and maternal health, nutrition, child protection.

Right after Cote d’Ivoire, Ms. Khodr was appointed as the UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan from June 2016 to April 2019. UNICEF programme in Afghanistan is among the top ten UNICEF programmes in the world, operating in one of the most fragile contexts. The work involved humanitarian action, as well as work on polio eradication and children impacted by armed conflict. After Afghanistan, Ms. Khodr moved in May 2019 to become the UNICEF Representative in Ethiopia where she served until end September 2021. Her work involved leading both humanitarian and development action in one of UNICEF’s largest three programmes in Africa. Following this, Ms. Khodr worked as Regional Director for UNICEF in the Middle East and North Africa region between March 2022 and December 2024, a region fraught with violence against children and with several emergencies (both protracted and acute), where she had oversight over 16 offices covering 22 countries.

Prior to joining UNICEF, Adele was a lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University from 1987 to 1994, overlapping with her work at UNICEF.