Clark enjoys anonymity

Head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) former Prime Minister Helen Clark, 59, has told the Dominion Post that “New Zealand is just not quite big enough for me at the moment” and that it is not her nature to sit on the sidelines. Clark took over the reins at the world body’s global development network in New York last April, the first woman to do so. Today she oversees an annual UNDP budget of six billion dollars and a global army of thousands of highly motivated people tasked with spearheading the UN drive to achieve eight poverty-reduction Millennium Development Goals by 2015. “I was looking for a new challenge commensurate with what I had been doing,” she told AFP. “I was the only person who came forward with my sort of skills,” she said. Clark also chairs the UN development group.