Sir Richard Jolly

Richard Jolly is Honorary Professor and Research Associate of the Institute of Development Studies, where he was Director in the 1970s. He has been a Trustee of OXFAM, a Council member of the Overseas Development Institute and Chairman of the UN Association of the United Kingdom and President of the British Association of Former UN Civil Servants.

From 1982 to 1996, Mr. Jolly was an Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, serving as Deputy Executive Director responsible for UNICEF’s programmes worldwide. He was then until 2000 senior adviser to the Administrator of UNDP and coordinator of the widely-acclaimed Human Development Report.

After leaving the UN he was co-director of the UN Intellectual History Project overseeing a multi-volume history of the UN’s contributions to economic and social ideas and policy. He was a co-author of several of the volumes and senior author of the final volume, UN Ideas That Changed the World. In 2014, he published a book on UNICEF: Global Governance that Works. He was knighted by the Queen in 2001 for his services to international development.

In 1959, Mr. Jolly was Secretary of the British Alpine Hannibal Expedition, which with the aid of Jumbo, an 11 year-old elephant, retraced the route which Hannibal took across the Alps in 218 BC.