Ravi Karkara

‎Senior Advisor to UN Assistant Secretary-General and ‎Senior Advisor Strategic Partnership and Advocacy in New York

Ravi Karkara

‎Senior Advisor to UN Assistant Secretary-General and ‎Senior Advisor Strategic Partnership and Advocacy in New York

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With over 20 years of experience, Ravi is an acknowledged expert in various development related fields. He has been driving innovation and advocacy as well as building strategic partnerships in the areas of human rights, participation, inclusion and gender equality, accountability, and social justice. Recently, Ravi developed a partnership between UN Women and the City of New York and organized a unique gender equality march with over 20,000 participants from the UN Headquarters to Times Square. Ravi has built UN Women’s Strategy on youth and gender equality and established and co-ordinates the Working Group on Youth and Gender Equality for the UN Interagency Network on Youth and Development.

He developed and led the youth outreach of the UN Secretary General's MyWorld Survey to deliver votes from more than 6 million youth from 193 nations. Ravi has been the recipient of the prestigious NOVUS Award – that unites global leaders from around the world to tackle today's big challenges via actionable change. He has also been appointed as honorary Global Ambassador by the prestigious Junior Chamber International.

Ravi’s publications have been fundamental in forming policy at the United Nations in youth-related areas. Representative publications include: Youth 21: Building the Architecture of Youth Engagement in the UN System”, which contributed to the creation of the United Nations Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth. In addition, he has been the co-chair of World We Want 2015— the largest UN & civil society post-2015 data-curation-visualization big data platform to further engage global populations on Sustainable Development Goals with over 1,000,000 perspectives on sustainable development goals harvested.

Additionally, Ravi has worked with other UN agencies and governments. He served as Global Advisor on Youth with UN-HABITAT and has represented UN-HABITAT as the co-chair of the UN Interagency Network on Youth Development. Ravi also served as the Global Strategic Advisor on Partnership with the UN Millennium Campaign. He served as the Global Advisor to the World Conference on Youth in Sri Lanka and contributed to the establishment of the 1st UN Youth Skills Day. He also served as Child and Adolescent Participation Advisor to the UN Study on ending Violence against Children in Geneva. He has written more than 80 publications.

  • Education
    • Jamia Millia Islamia