Deputy Regional Director

^{Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown}

Sarah Douglas has been Deputy Regional Director for the Americas and the Caribbean at UN Women since January 2026. She previously served as Deputy Chief of Peace and Security at the UN Women Headquarters in New York, where she worked closely on peacekeeping, peacebuilding, mediation, security sector reform, counterterrorism, and the prevention of violent extremism. Before this appointment, she was Gender Advisor at the UN Peacebuilding Support Office.  

She worked as a Policy Specialist on the Peace and Security team, leading the section's gender-responsive peacebuilding work. She led UN Women's efforts to integrate gender and women's perspectives into security sector reform, disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, community security, arms control, and other stabilization processes.

Before joining UN Women, she worked for UNDP and the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) on DDR, Community Security, and Arms Control programs in South Sudan, Darfur, eastern Sudan, and the Three Transitional Areas, ensuring that gender and women's issues were integrated throughout the design, implementation, and monitoring of programs. She joined the UN in 2003 in the Peace and Security section of UNIFEM, where she worked until 2006.

Sarah holds a bachelor's degree in Women's Studies from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in Gender and Development from the London School of Economics.