Read about Alexandra Paola Diaz Tovar

What brought you to a career in technology at the United Nations?

The great opportunity to contribute to peace building through knowledge and experience in technology and innovation acquired in multiple business environments. Due to Peace Agreement was signed in Colombia, I have found the possibility to serve in my country in a very significative way adding value by enabling the decision-making processes understanding and using data and information to facilitate the peace agreement implementation, identifying intervention points where the greatest beneficial impact is generated for counterparts and society.

What has been your favorite IT project at the United Nations and what was your technical contribution?

My favorite IT project is a very specific one for the Mission that consists in a collaborative database to register information of former combatants to enable the access to reintegration and security guarantees rights specified in the peace agreement. I liked it the most since the collaboration has been among Government, former combatants and UN. My technical contribution was across the project from understanding the needs of information gathering, conceptualizing the solution options, joint building the database responding to the requirements and the disparate levels of data literacy, capacity building for the participants, analyzing data and producing visual results to share information as required for proactive incidence and problem-solving approaches.

What advice would you give women interested in pursuing a field in technology?

Follow your interest, you are in the right path. Technology is a very powerful tool that enable us to enhance the beneficial impact of our contributions and let us transform realities in very meaningful ways by empowering people to collaborate and be problem-solvers from basics such as access to information to applied technology to solve complex problematics.