Helen Clark

Helen Elizabeth Clark (born 26 February 1950) is a New Zealand politician and international civil servant. She entered Parliament in 1981 as the Labour MP for Mount Albert, held several ministerial portfolios in the Fourth Labour Government (including Health and Housing), and became Deputy Prime Minister under Geoffrey Palmer in 1989. After leading Labour in opposition from 1993, she became the country's first elected female Prime Minister in November 1999, serving three consecutive terms until November 2008.

As Prime Minister, Clark's government pursued a centre-left agenda that included the introduction of paid parental leave, the Working for Families package, the KiwiSaver retirement scheme, and the establishment of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 2004, replacing appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In foreign policy, she declined to commit combat troops to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, maintained New Zealand's nuclear-free stance, and signed a free trade agreement with China in 2008 — the first such agreement between China and a developed country.

After losing the 2008 election to John Key's National Party, Clark was appointed Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in April 2009, becoming the first woman to lead the agency. She also chaired the United Nations Development Group. She served two terms at UNDP until 2017, during which she stood as a candidate for UN Secretary-General in 2016; the post ultimately went to António Guterres.

Since leaving the UN, Clark has remained active in global policy debates. In 2020 she was appointed co-chair, alongside former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, which examined the WHO and member-state handling of COVID-19 and delivered its main report, COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic, in May 2021. She is frequently cited in MUN and IR contexts on multilateralism, gender in leadership, and pandemic governance.