Anna Tibaijuka

"Actually I don’t care about those people because either they are not informed or have their own ulterior motives! Most of this stuff is misinformation and outright propaganda. First, there is no adverse audit query for UN-HABITAT. On the contrary, we achieved an outstanding financial performance, including from our fundraising events. I had inherited a bankrupt organization in 2002. I built it up from scratch."

"When the UN Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, visited this city on his first official mission on taking office, he provided a personal donation of 100,000 US dollars of seed money to help launch in 2008 what is today known as the Moonbeam Youth Training Centre – a centre for young people without the resources or skills to lift themselves out of poverty."

"Well, that experience forced me out of the comfort zone and reminded me I was still an African woman who must fight any injustice for the sake of those coming after me. I am happy I emerged victorious and will go down in history in having helped formalise the status of the Nairobi duty station after it had existed informally for over 40 years, without [there being] an independent position of an under-secretarygeneral to function as a leader created by the General Assembly. In other words, before my struggle, the position of an independent director general for the Nairobi duty station did not exist."

"I believe that one cannot solve the problems that one does not fully understand.This is why I decided to take the UN secretary general to see real life in the slums.The outcome was that he gave a personal grant for UN-HABITAT to work in the slums of Kenya, as part of the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme that I had initiated with the government of Kenya when I first arrived in 2000."

"As we all know, the problems of inadequate shelter, health care, education, poverty and unemployment among young people can lead them all too easily into crime. Ignoring their plight thus carries tremendous social and economic costs."