Jessica Faieta is a Senior Fellow and lecturer at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University, where she teaches on development in Latin America and the Caribbean and on the United Nations.

She retired from the UN System after 30 years of distinguished service that spanned the development, peace and humanitarian pillars. She served in Colombia as Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the UN Mission for the verification of the Peace Accords, and led the UN response to the Venezuela migration crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Faieta was UN Assistant Secretary-General and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean and held other UN leadership positions, including during the recovery efforts for the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2017 Category 5 hurricanes in the Caribbean. She also served in the executive offices of the UN Secretary-General and the UNDP Administrator and had assignments in El Salvador, Belize, Argentina, Cuba, Guyana, and Panama. She was responsible for important publications, including the UNDP Regional Human Development Reports.

A national from Ecuador, Faieta is a member of GWL Voices, an organization of global women leaders, and serves on various boards. She holds a master’s degree in international affairs and an MBA from Columbia University. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York where she also obtained her bachelor’s degree in economics. She has been a World Fellow at Yale and an Advanced Leadership fellow at Harvard.