Maria Fernanda Espinosa

As the United Nations seeks its next Secretary-General in 2026, Maria Fernanda Espinosa is one of four women among the six nominees. In the organization’s eighty-year history, a woman has yet to  hold the Organization’s highest office. 

Born in Salamanca, Spain, Espinosa spent her formative years in Ecuador. She earned a bachelor’s degree in applied linguistics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador and completed graduate studies at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, where she specialized in social sciences and Amazonian studies. Espinosa is also a celebrated poet, honored with the National Poetry Prize of Ecuador in 1990.

Espinosa has held several senior-level ministerial roles for the Ecuadorian government, at various points in her career leading  the nation's foreign policy, defense administration, and cultural and environmental departments. At the international level, she served as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the UN in both New York and Geneva. In 2018, she became President of the UN General Assembly, serving through 2019; she was only the fourth woman, and the first from Latin America and the Caribbean, to preside over the body since its establishment in 1945.

Drawing on a background in multilateral diplomacy, environmental governance, and institutional leadership, Espinosa, if appointed UNSG, pledges to focus on modernizing the UN, establishing an early-action framework for global security, and ensuring that the UN adapts in ways that better address complex climate and financial challenges through inclusive multilateralism.