Azusa Kubota

Resident Representative, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Bhutan

Azusa Kubota is the Resident Representative of UNDP in Bhutan since March 2019. Prior to her appointment as the Resident Representative for Bhutan, she served as the Manager and Head of Office of UNDP in the Solomon Islands and the UN Joint Presence Manager for UNDP, UNICEF, UNFPA and UNWOMEN.

She was also the Deputy Resident Representative (Programme and Operations) of UNDP Lao PDR and the Maldives. She was also with the UNDP Evaluation Office in New York, where she led country-level evaluations of UNDP’s contribution in several countries as well as global thematic evaluations. In that function, she drafted guidance on programme management and evaluation for UNDP.

She worked with the government of South Africa in organizing the second international conference on use of evaluation for public policies. Before joining the Evaluation Office, Ms. Kubota worked for UNDP in Malawi as a Programme Officer, supporting interventions on trade and investment promotion, capacity building and system development in planning, monitoring and evaluation for national poverty reduction strategies and pro-poor budgeting. Prior to that she worked for NGOs in Senegal, Lesotho and Washington D.C. where she was responsible for organizing training programmes for senior government officials in the areas of international law and economic development.

Ms. Kubota is from Japan. She has a Master’s degree in International Affairs in Economic and Political Development from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, USA, and a Bachelor’s degree from Smith College, Northampton, USA. She has spent one semester at Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Dakar, Senegal and studied French at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.