Juan Chaves-Gonzalez, MA

Juan Chaves-Gonzalez, MA

Visiting Scientist, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Juan Chaves-Gonzalez headshot

Juan is a political scientist who has worked for the past 20 years in conflict prevention and recovery, peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian action. He works at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York with an innovation team created by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2018 to help the multilateral system get ahead of predictable crises. His team leads large-scale anticipatory action pilots for infectious diseases, drought, and flooding, across a dozen countries. Juan’s career has focused on finding better ways and instruments to finance humanitarian action, including through the establishment and management of country-based pooled funds in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Colombia. In 2015, he supported OCHA’s substantive engagement in the World Humanitarian Summit and led research and policy work on the localization of aid within the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) Humanitarian Financing Task Team. He has worked for UN agencies in Colombia, Fiji, Sudan, South Sudan, and New York. Before, he worked for the Government of Colombia developing public policy for the de-escalation of the country’s armed conflict, promoting peacebuilding and socioeconomic recovery across war-torn communities. Juan has written several reports and articles on topics including technology in humanitarian action, COVID, and disease outbreaks including a new article on cholera.

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