Charmaine Rodrigues 

[Upon Hon Heine's election as the first woman President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the first women head of state/government in the Pacific.]

"Thank you so much Charmaine. Your encouragement and support contributed to today's achievement for Pacific, in particular, Marshallese women and girls! Kommol tata."

Majuro, Marshall Islands

“Charmaine is an excellent technical specialist with a particularly impressive ability to develop strategic visioning which can guide programming. She likes working in teams and is very good at identifying how people can collaborate across issues/sectors for maximum impact, for example, by working with parliamentarians to promote better structural responses to address women’s lack of political participation...Charmaine was a great colleague and an excellent collaborator. I admired her ability to develop such good networks; her partners really seem to trust her and are very responsive, as is she."

New York, USA

“Charmaine has very deep knowledge on issues around gender mainstreaming and women’s political participation in particular. I have seen her advise government officials, parliamentarians and civil society actors (including advising on Cabinet submissions and CSO advocacy documents), and they have all been deeply appreciative of her guidance. She likes working in teams and is a very good facilitator as a result because she likes working with people."

Suva, Fiji Isands

"Charmaine worked with our UNDP team and the UN Mission in Somalia to establish a new Integrated Constitutional Support Team, including by providing technical advice and support from HQ to both UNSOM and UNDP on constitutional issues. Such is the trust that Charmaine has built with the Mission and DPA HQ that DPA requested Charmaine to support/facilitate constitutional strategic planning between UNSOM and UNDP in October 2013 and again in March 2014. During these missions with us, Charmaine also worked with UNSOM to develop a constitutional roadmap which the Mission still uses to guide their interventions and delivered a number of additional concept notes and papers for our team on constitutional issues. In terms of programming support, Charmaine also led the drafting of the our UNDP Parliamentary Support Project and our UNDP/UNSOM Constitutional Support Project, which we have used to ground our support for key national institutions."

Mogadishu, Somalia