Kimberly Gamble Payne
Adjunct Lecturer
Kimberly Gamble-Payne is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Global Health at George Washington University and in the International Affairs Program of the City College of New York. She also teaches in Columbia University’s United Nations Studies certificate program.
For more than 25 years she worked in the United Nations system, mostly with UNICEF. Kimberly led the Child Rights and Public Policy team at UNICEF headquarters in New York before spending nearly a decade in Africa. She was the first Regional Advisor for Child Rights and Child Protection where she coordinated and supervised the Child Protection Network across 23 countries of UNICEF’s Eastern and Southern Africa Region. She was appointed as the UNICEF Country Representative in Lesotho and, together with the US ambassador to Lesotho, she co-led the Joint Donor-UN Theme Group on HIV/AIDS. During that time, she also served as one a coordinator and senior advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children (the Graca Machel Report). That report led to the establishment of both a UN Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict and the office of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (SRSG CAAC)
Following her assignments in Africa, Kimberly assumed the position of Director of Programmes in the Deputy Secretary-General’s UN Office of Partnerships. She also served as a senior adviser to the UN Joint Programme on Adolescent Girls and consultancies with UN offices dealing with critical global issues of urbanization; environment and climate change; disarmament and humanitarian action; and human rights.
Prior to her assignments with UNICEF headquarters, she was the founding Director of the Washington Office for the U.S. Committee for UNICEF and a Congressional Liaison Officer in the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs in USAID. She is currently a member of the board of Doctors of the World, USA, a humanitarian action, and human rights organization.
Kimberly holds a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
