Raul Thomas

Raul Thomas is the Assistant Director-General for Business Operations at WHO headquarters in Geneva. Over the last two decades he has promoted mobility and diversity by example in various positions with WHO partner agencies and country and regional offices. Raul’s father worked for the Trinidad and Tobago Foreign Service and he was born and spent his early childhood years in Venezuela. Intrigued by the colourful language and culture around his home, he knew early on that he wanted his future to be full of mobility.  He also had occasion to glimpse the suffering and hardships many people were faced with and began to understand the inequities of society. He sometimes accompanied his father while he provided consular services to nationals and recalls a married couple who were struggling to access education and healthcare for their children. They didn’t speak the language and could not interact with the national systems, but his help really empowered them. “I realized then that with the inequities I’d seen, helping needy and vulnerable populations was something I wanted to do for a living,” he recalls. He attended an international school and studied accounting and finance at university, after which he started working with United Nations Development Programme. Having then moved to Washington, he successfully applied for a finance assistant job in the Pan American Health Organization, which changed his perception of how his accounting and finance qualifications could be put to good use for global public health.

Raul had been noticed by a fellow officer when he successfully recuperated and accounted for a large portion of a specific programme fund. This had been a long and tedious project, but it established his nature as someone who follows through, and later on he was recommended for a promotion to a PAHO field office on the US–Mexican border. The office included the secretariat of an association funded by WHO that dealt with cross border health issues. As the AIDS epidemic worsened during those years, Raul found that his role included some hands-on programmatic work that benefitted the marginalized community. As he listened to victims explain the stigma and began to understand the suffering that these projects addressed, the link between his own finance and administration work and the people involved with health projects was established. This connection grew stronger with each new post he served in. After PAHO, Raul was encouraged to apply for a Budget and Finance Officer position in the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. Having gained experience with the financial rules and regulations of WHO’s partner agency, he was again encouraged to take a similar post in the WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific, which was followed by the Eastern Mediterranean and the Africa regional offices, before finally moving to WHO’s headquarters in Geneva in 2019.

The enriching experience that Raul has gained from working in several continents gives him a unique appreciation for the strength of diversity and the challenges of building inclusion. He explains that “these experiences have steered how I go about policy development and guided my interaction with colleagues.” Part of Raul’s work in headquarters is about risk management, and it follows that WHO can achieve better compliance in its operational work with rules and policies when they are developed with a true understanding of the countries they are used in. A mobile workforce gives WHO a greater insight into what works in different settings and equips the organization with a wider range of perspectives in many challenging circumstances. “It also helps to spread the burden of serving in some of the more challenging duty stations,” he adds. Ultimately, WHO’s work to strengthen health systems and build universal care relies on effective country office operations.