Joelle Tanguy (Switzerland)

Joelle Tanguy joined the Executive Team of DNDi in October 2018 as Director of External Affairs, building on her experience as Under-Secretary-General at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent; Managing Director at the GAVI Alliance; Executive Director at Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders); Senior Vice President & Managing Director at Ambassador R. Holbrooke’s Global Business Coalition; Director at the TB Alliance; and, more recently, Director at UN Women. On a sabbatical from the Silicon Valley, she volunteered for Médecins Sans Frontières in Uganda, Somalia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, and lead humanitarian missions. She then served as US Executive Director of MSF, where she turned the nascent US organization into the first source of private funding for the global network. Joelle has supported access to medicines campaigns and developed public-private partnerships: she helped establish the TB Alliance as its founding Director for External Relations and Public Policy; at the Business Coalition, she guided Fortune 500 firms to engage with HIV; she served as focal point for the private sector on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Board of Directors; and she advised Human Rights Watch. Joelle now serves on the board of the Access to Medicine Index Foundation. As a Managing Director at GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, Joelle successfully orchestrated its first major refinancing effort (US$ 4.3 billion) to immunize more than 250 million of the world’s poorest children by 2015 and save 4 million lives. A women’s rights and diversity advocate, Joelle has also led UN Women’s Strategic Partnerships, Advocacy, and Communication division. A former Executive in Residence of the Geneva Center for Security Policy, Joelle also continues to advise humanitarian initiatives and serves as a Senior Advisor to CERAH, a joint Centre of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and the University of Geneva. Joelle received her MBA from France’s HEC MBA in a joint programme with Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.