FN-diplomaten Fatma Samoura får toppost i Fifa

Fatma Samoura, a national of Senegal born in 1962, is a senior United Nations (UN) official. Currently (as of November 2007), she is the seniormost UN official in Chad. After joining the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in 1995, she served as Country Director for WFP in Djibouti and Cameroon, and also worked at the WFP headquarters in Rome. She covered numerous complex emergencies, including Kosovo, Liberia, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, and Timor-Leste (East Timor). On 1 November 2007, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in consultation with the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes, appointed her as Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator (DHC) for eastern Chad. She is based in the town of Abéché, located approximately 80 kilometres west of the border with the Sudan's conflict-torn Darfur region. Chad currently hosts over 280,000 refugees and over 170,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), most of whom are in the eastern region, and she was tasked with working for their return. The official's functions consist in providing support and guidance to a team composed of seven United Nations agencies and over 40 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in eastern Chad. Fatma Samora is married and has three children.