Isabel Saint Malo

Isabel Saint Malo, Vice President and Minister of Foreign Affairs (2014-2019), Panama.

 

Bio: Isabel Saint Malo, former Vice President and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Panama, brings extensive global experience, particularly on the role of the private sector in the global development agenda. Her expertise includes ESG as a critical business issue, sustainability, human capital, corporate social responsibility and human rights in the framework of business risk and opportunity. Currently, she is a Senior Policy Adviser to the Administrator of the United Nations Development Program and has recently joined as a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Foundation for Reporting Standards (IFRS), at a moment when the IFRS is working to deliver a comprehensive baseline of sustainability-related disclosure standards. She has led and facilitated over a dozen dialogue and consensus building processes around development issues in several countries in Latin America, bringing together diverse views and constructing a common agenda with the participation of different stakeholders. She is an experienced leader with a record of success in solving complex sustainable development problems particularly as they relate to community development. She has served in a wide range of boards in the private sector and non-profit organizations. Before joining the government of Panama, she founded the Global Shapers hub of Panama City, an initiative of the World Economic Forum. Mrs. Saint Malo has been a champion in sponsoring issues related to transparency in Latin America and gender equality, such as being appointed an expert to the Global Agenda Council on Transparency (2014) by the World Economic Forum. She led the Latin American and Caribbean UN Women-ILO-OECD initiative “Equal Pay International Coalition” and was the IDBWEF Panama´s Gender Parity Taskforce. Following the completion of her government mandate, she was invited as a fellow of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University in 2019 and later the Advanced Leadership Initiative of the Harvard Business School in 2022. Her career began at the Mission of Panama to the United Nations in New York as one of the youngest delegates to the Third Committee and then served at the United Nations Development Program Office in Panama from 1994 to 2009 on governance, poverty and sustainability issues, rising to manage the program portfolio.