Thoraya Obaid

Thoraya Obaid (born March 2, 1945, Baghdad, Iraq) Saudi politician who was executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA; 2001–10). She was the first Saudi national to head a UN agency.

Obaid was raised in a devout Muslim family. Her parents enrolled her in an Islamic school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, when she was three. Because education for girls was limited in Saudi Arabia at the time, Obaid was sent in 1951 to the American College for Girls in Cairo. She later became the first Saudi woman to receive a government scholarship to study in the United States. She earned degrees in English literature from Mills College (B.A., 1966) in Oakland, California, and from Wayne State University (M.A., 1968; Ph.D., 1974) in Detroit. In 1975 Obaid began working for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, and she became that agency’s deputy executive secretary in 1993. She chaired the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Gender in 1996, and in 1997 she participated in the UN Inter-Agency Gender Mission to Afghanistan. The latter mission resulted in the recommendation of a more nuanced policy in approaching the Taliban about gender-equality issues in light of the fact that the Taliban’s was a fragmented and ideologically inconsistent political system with which unilateral negotiations were likely to be ineffective. In 1998 she was appointed director of the United Nations Population Fund’s Division for Arab States and Europe. Her 25 years of experience at the UN and her demonstrated commitment to empowering women moved UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to describe her as the ideal candidate to head the UNFPA, an agency dedicated to promoting equality between the sexes as well as universal education and health care, especially better reproductive health care for women.

On January 1, 2001, Obaid became executive director of the UNFPA. Its campaigns to battle AIDS, expand the availability of reproductive information and services for adolescents, and end violence against women met with resistance in many conservative areas of the world, especially those that were reluctant to address such concomitant issues as homosexuality, adolescent sexuality, and women’s rights. Obaid called particular attention to the Millennium Development Goals, a series of eight targets adopted by the UN to be accomplished by 2015. Among them were the promotion of gender equality and the betterment of maternal health.

As a Muslim woman herself, Obaid was sensitive to the unique concerns of the status of women in Islamic countries. In Saudi Arabia, for example, where women could not appear in public unless completely covered, were not permitted to drive, and could not travel without written permission from male relatives, Obaid’s success and visibility contributed to changes in government policy, including an agreement by the government to sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Obaid stressed that women’s rights, rather than contradicting the tenets of Islam, were in fact an integral part of its value system. She often cited her own parents’ commitment to her education.

In 2002 Obaid outspokenly expressed her dismay at the decision by the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush to withhold millions of dollars in funding from the UNFPA after a partisan organization had inaccurately alleged the agency’s support of forced abortions in China. In 2006 Obaid was also appointed chair of the High Level Committee on the Management (HLCM), which provided advice on administration and management to the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB). She stepped down as UNFPA director in 2010. The next year Obaid was appointed by the UN to investigate the organization’s inadequate performance during the culmination of Sri Lanka’s long-running civil war in 2009.