Dear Colleagues
On behalf of the IPPF Board of Trustees, I am absolutely delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Alvaro Bermejo to a second and final four-year term as Director-General of IPPF through to 2026.
This is not only a strong affirmation of Alvaro’s extraordinary contribution to our Federation over the course of his first term, but also evidence of the Board’s resolute consensus that Alvaro is the right person to lead the tremendously important work of IPPF during the sobering times ahead.
Alvaro has been a strategic, visionary, and innovative leader throughout his first term. Most notably, under his leadership, IPPF ensured sexual and reproductive health and rights remained relevant and urgent even during a global pandemic. It was also Alvaro who made possible, and delivered on, an ambitious reform agenda for IPPF. He helped ensure the conditions were in place for appointment of a competency-based Board of Trustees to help complete the process. He has also fostered and nurtured often difficult discussions about our diversity, leading to the Secretariat’s Anti-Racism Programme of Action, the work to promote women’s leadership, encouragement of governance reform at the national level, and much more.
As we work to lift-up our Federation so that our decisions and our work are based consistently on the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion, we know that it is Alvaro, spurred on by his colleagues, who will urge us all to do better. He will help ensure IPPF is, by all measures, a truly anti-racist, diverse, and inclusive organisation. He will help the stronger alignment of IPPF with the broader agenda of reckoning within the international development sector, given its unfinished business of decolonisation. And he will help us promote and protect freedom and dignity in sexuality and for all gender identities.
We want leadership that enables IPPF to promote and protect our human rights to love one another without fear but we recognise these directions involve bold and courageous shifts. We know it also requires self-awareness, humility, and grit. We have all that in Alvaro.
IPPF is on a journey. We are designing together a new strategy together – to guide and sustain us on our path to 2028. The strategy design process we are following is more innovative, more inclusive and participatory, with youth at the very centre of everything we do. However, its finalization will not be easy. It will involve tough choices for likely tough times ahead for a world of people facing tough challenges.
It means that guiding our global Federation as we finalize and decide together our Strategy 2028, will be no easy task. Leading a unified Secretariat, supporting our MAs, staff and volunteers, as IPPF then sets about to implement that agenda is also a tall order. However, that is why we need Alvaro and his leadership.
That is also why the Board of Trustees could not be more thrilled to share with you the news of his reappointment for a second and final term (under the rules) of four years, commencing in March 2022.
Please join us in thanking Alvaro as his last term as IPPF’s DG enters its final months, and in congratulating him on his reappointment for a second term.
Warmest Regards
IPPF Board Chairperson
Kate Gilmore