Biography|Joyce Msuya — The Gigiri Compound She Held After 22 November

On 21 May 2018 the Secretary-General's office in New York announced Joyce Msuya of Tanzania as Deputy Executive Director of UNEP in Nairobi.

The notice is filed as a personnel appointment.

She would succeed Ibrahim Thiaw of Mauritania.

UNEP's own biography dates her arrival in the job to August 2018.

The next date is sharper.

On 20 November 2018 a UN note to correspondents accepted Erik Solheim's resignation as executive director, effective Thursday 22 November.

The same note said the deputy, Msuya, would be appointed acting executive director while a search began.

AP and BBC confirmed the sequence that week.

She held the acting chair from the United Nations Office at Nairobi, the Gigiri compound on United Nations Avenue, at 1°14′05″S, 36°48′59″E.

UNEP and UN-Habitat share that campus.

She kept the acting title until Inger Andersen took the post on 15 June 2019, a date UNEP published from this same compound.

Between those two dates she ran a headquarters whose previous occupant had left under an expenses audit.

The scandal is Solheim's record, not hers.

What happened here is a deputy from Usangi sitting in the executive chair of the only UN programme headquartered in Africa, for seven months, with the multilateral environment agreements still on the books.

She remained deputy until February 2022, then moved to OCHA in New York.

The compound is a working campus.

Flags, the avenue, and Karura Forest across the fence are what a visitor still finds.

Photo: Timbilimu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Neighbourhood view: Queen Asali, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.