Dr Saadia Sanchez-Vegas

Director and Representative of the UNESCO Cluster Office for the Caribbean

Saadia Sanchez-Vegas, PhD, is the Director and Representative of the UNESCO Cluster Office for the Caribbean in Kingston, Jamaica since September 1, 2020. In this role, her regional mandate covers twenty (20) countries and territories in the English and Dutch-speaking sub-region of the Caribbean. She also serves as Officer-in-Charge for the Regional Office for Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean in Havana. 

Prior to this, she served as Director of the UNESCO Office in Quito and Representative to Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela from February 10, 2014 until August 31, 2020. Saadia Sanchez-Vegas is a sociologist with a degree from the University of Zulia (Venezuela), a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University (USA) and a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of California at Berkeley (USA).

As an experienced senior manager with more than 20 years of practice, she has had an extensive career in management, technical cooperation and international relations.

In her assignment as Director of the UNESCO Cluster Office for the Caribbean, Ms. Sanchez-Vegas is committed to exercise strategic and operational leadership to advocate for the Caribbean Small Island Developing States, SIDS as UNESCO´s priority in the pursuit of peacebuilding,, eradication of poverty, sustainable development and inter-cultural dialogue through programmes in Education, Natural Sciences, Social and Human sciences , Culture, and Communication and Information.