As the Director of the Programme Partnerships and Fundraising Department, Mr Kakkattil oversees programmatic and political partnerships, including UNAIDS’ engagement with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, political and parliamentary engagement and UNAIDS’ fundraising efforts.
Pradeep Kakkattil started his career in India as a print and television journalist and filmmaker. He gave up his media career when a close friend tested positive for HIV in the early 1990s and started to respond to the potential threat of HIV to people of his generation.
He became a principal investigator for the World Health Organization Global Programme on AIDS on the sex industry in south India, based in Chennai, and helped to establish networks of community organizations of female sex workers, men who have sex with men and transgender people. He later moved to Delhi to help design and expand prevention programmes and managed the partnerships for sexual health portfolio as a staff member of the India office of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development from 1996 to 1999.
Mr Kakkattil joined UNAIDS in India in 1999 and has since worked in various capacities. He served as the Deputy Director of the UNAIDS Regional Support Team for Asia and the Pacific between 2012 and 2015 and served as a senior adviser to the UNAIDS Executive Director between 2015 and 2017. In that capacity, he coordinated the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS in 2016.
