Winnie Byanyima is a politician, the Executive Director of Oxfam International, and the first female Ugandan aeronautical engineer. In August 2019, she was appointed as the executive director of UNAIDS by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. She took the position in November of the same year. Besides making outstanding achievements, Winnie Byanyima is a leader in women’s rights, peacebuilding, and democratic governance.
In early 2020, she was named among Forbes 50 Africa’s Most Powerful Women. She is the one behind the foundation of the 60-member Global Gender and Climate Alliance.
Byanyima’s Background
Winnie Byanyima was born on 13th January 1959 in Mbarara District in the Western Region of Uganda. Her parents are the late Gertrude Byanyima, the former school teacher who passed away in November 2008, and the late Boniface Byanyima. Winnie has five siblings, namely Anthony, Martha, Edith, Olivia, and Abraham.
Winnie Byanyima was married to Kizza Besigye on 7th July 1999 at Nsambya, Kampala. Besigye is the former chairman of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) political party in Uganda. They are blessed with a son named Anselm.
Before Winnie Byanyima became a Ugandan diplomat in 2004, she was a member of FDC. Thus, she reduced her participation in partisan Ugandan politics.
Educational Background
Winnie started her academic quest at Mount Saint Mary’s College Namagunga in Mukono District. She went to the University of Manchester, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering.
Besides being the first Ugandan female to become an Aeronautical Engineer, she holds a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering specializing in energy conservation from Cranfield University.
Winnie Byanyima Career
Winnie Byanyima began her career as a flight engineer at Uganda Airlines. She joined the rebellion between 1981-1986 when Museveni started Ugandan Bush War. You might wonder why she joined Museveni in the Bush War. The two, Byanyima and Museveni, were both raised together at Byanyima’s household. Byanyima was responsible for most of Museveni’s education.
Kizza Besigye, a husband to Winnie Byanyima, was part of the squad. The three were soldiers in the National Resistance Army (NRA) during the war. Byanyima served as Uganda’s ambassador to France from 1989 to 1994. She stepped in to serve for this position after the NRA won the war.
After then, Winnie returned to Uganda to be active in politics. She was part of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the 1995 Ugandan Constitution.
She served for two terms as a member of parliament then represented Mbarara Municipality from 1994 to 2004. Byanyima was later selected as the Directorate of Women, Gender, and Development at the African Union’s headquarter in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In November 2006, she was appointed as the director of the Gender Team in the Bureau for Development Policy at UNDP.
Winnie replaced Jeremy Hobbs as the next executive director of Oxfam International in January 2013. She began her five-year directorship on 1st May 2013. Later she announced that she had accepted an offer from Oxfam’s Board of Supervisors to serve as Oxfam International’s executive director for additional five years.
She chaired the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2015. While still serving under that position, she managed to press action to narrow the gap between rich and poor. In 2014, it was reported that the share of the world’s wealth owned by 1 percent of the world populace had increased to almost 50 percent.
Ban Ki-Moon Winnie, United Nations Secretary-General, appointed Winnie Byanyima in November 2016 to the High-level Panel on Access to Medicine. It was co-chaired by the former President of Switzerland, Ruth Dreifuss, and former president of Botswana, Festus Mogae.
Besides serving on the International Centre for Research on Women and Building Foundation, she has equally served on many global boards.
Winnie’s Remarkable Works
She led Uganda’s first parliamentary women’s caucus, where she advocated a ground-breaking gender equality establishment in the 1995 post-conflict constitution.
She also founded a civil society organization Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE). She was among the signatory of Uganda’s 1985 peace agreement and has also helped support women’s participation in peace processes in South Africa, Burundi, Sudan, and Rwanda.
Winnie Byanyima is indeed an iron lady. Not to mention, she co-founded a 60-member Global Gender and Climate Alliance of Civil Society, bilateral and multilateral organizations. She also chaired an Un-wide task force on climate change and gender aspects of the Millennium Development Goals.
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