Today, 8 March 2025 is International Women’s Day.
Celebrated globally to focus and take positive action on issues centered around gender equality and women empowerment, this year’s commemoration is being held under the theme, “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”
Special about the celebration is that it marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, whose document is the most progressive and widely endorsed blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide that has transformed the women’s rights agenda in terms of legal protection, access to services, youth engagement, and change in social norms, stereotypes and ideas stuck in the past.
The theme for 2025 rallies for positive action to unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all, and a feminist future where no one is left behind.
Diaspora Digital News puts the spotlight on a woman who embodies this year’s theme: IOM’s Director General, Amy Pope.
On the 1st of October 2023, Amy Pope became the Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), making history as the first woman to hold the position in the organization’s 73-year establishment.
Prior to her appointment, she served as Deputy Director General for Management and Reform at the IOM, Senior Advisor on Migration to the President, Executive Office of the President of the United States, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Homeland Security Advisor, U.S. National Security Council (White House), Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, in addition to many other solid roles which prepared her adequately for success in her current position.
She therefore brings a wealth of experience in addressing complex migration issues and a passion for changing the global narrative about people on the move.
In the early part of her five-year term, Ms. Pope has put the organization on a new strategic path designed to ensure that IOM can respond to an increasingly complex migration landscape. The new direction not only enables IOM to help save and protect people on the move today, but also to be proactive about challenges before they become crises.
“You just give somebody a little space. Everybody has purpose. Everybody has dreams, everybody wants to be seen.” – Amy Pope, Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Building on reforms she began implementing as IOM’s Deputy Director General for Management and Reform, Ms. Pope has also led organizational changes that focus IOM’s structure and resources toward the work its teams do in the field.
While working as the Senior Advisor on Migration to US President Biden and serving as the Deputy Homeland Security Advisor to President Obama, Ms. Pope developed and implemented comprehensive strategies to address migration in areas such as countering trafficking in persons, resettling refugees, and vulnerable people, and preparing communities to respond and adapt to climate-related crises.
In an interview with the UN’s Global Communications on why celebrating the contributions of migrants is a win-win for societies around the world, Amy Pope said: “The evidence is pretty overwhelming that it doesn’t even take very long for migration to actually pay out significantly for the communities who host the migrants, and definitely for the communities that migrants are coming from.”
She graduated magna cum laude from the Duke University School of Law with a Juris Doctor, has a BA in Political Science (with Honors) from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and is fluent in English and French.
Amy Pope is married, with two daughters.
Edited by: Theresa R. Fianko
Attribution (Image and additional information): IOM l United Nations.