Anacláudia Rossbach

Anacláudia Marinheiro Centeno Rossbach is executive director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). The former director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute (August 2022–July 2024), Rossbach is an economist with more than 20 years of experience working on issues such as precarious settlements, informality, social housing, and land and urban policy. She has worked on projects such as designing one of the world’s most significant municipal-level slum-upgrade programs, in São Paulo, Brazil. She was the founding director of an NGO that developed high-impact projects in informal communities in the state of São Paulo and the city of Recife, Brazil. Later, she served as a senior housing specialist for the World Bank in Brazil and internationally. In that role, she served as a high-level consultant and provided technical assistance to develop and implement Brazilian housing and slum-upgrading policies, including the Growth Acceleration Program for Favelas and the housing subsidies program Minha Casa, Minha Vida (“My House, My Life”). From 2014 to 2022, she worked for the Cities Alliance, serving as the regional manager for Latin America and the Caribbean. In that role, she supported communities of practice, promoted the transfer and exchange of knowledge, and provided advisory services on housing and urban policies in the global south. In addition, from 2020 to 2021, she led the organization’s Global Programme on Informality, a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.