With her trademark short-cropped hair and humble mien, Dr Anna Tibaijuka has managed to leave a humanitarian legacy as she leaves office of UN-Habitat executive director.

For this 50-year-old, praises abound. “Few people will leave a legacy like hers,” many a speaker at her farewell party last week said.

All the attention Tibaijuka got on this day was well deserved. Kofi Annan said she should “take great credit not only for having driven the necessary institutional reforms and having built much-needed public awareness of settlement issues, but also for standing as a sign of hope for the many women, particularly in Africa, that are still refused professional opportunity.”

She is also an icon to many women in her home country, Tanzania, where she is the founding chairperson of an organization that champions women’s rights.

She is also the founding chair of a girl’s education trust that is aimed at promoting the highest education levels among poor and orphaned girls in her country and has always taken the opportunity to remind the world that she is a mother of five.

Her economic background, accumulated over years of studies while in Sweden, has also allowed her to serve as a board member of the Tanzania Economic Policy Development and Management Foundation besides being a director of a number of private companies.

But it is her success in forging strategic partnerships with financial institutions for investments in housing and urban infrastructure that got the UN General Assembly to place their faith in her and give her a second term.

During his time as UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan gave Tibaijuka an office second only to him. The first — and only — African woman to reach this level within the UN.  And yet that level of empowerment has done nothing to make her lose her head, so to speak.

When the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon first came to the UN offices in Nairobi in his official capacity, Tibaijuka took him through the filthy and extensive Kibera slums. They jumped over burst sewer pipes, and walked past children playing by flying toilets.

Better housing champion

There was no better way to champion for better housing for city slum dwellers. She had, in a few steps, proven the need to honour the Millineum promise for better housing.

And it worked. It was just what Ban needed to “resolve again a firm commitment to work for the improvement of the living conditions, education, water, sanitation, housing.”

Still, she faulted the MDG target for UN-Habitat as grossly inadequate, “a conceptual omission” since it was a plan to make significant improvements in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers — just 10 per cent of the world’s slum dwellers. She has maintained that the target should have attempted to halve the one billion slum dwellers’ total.