When I think about who should become the next United Nations Secretary-General, I do not begin with résumés, regional rotations or diplomatic arithmetic. I begin with a memory: the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, when I was a young, relatively new member of UN staff and had the chance to work with Rebeca Grynspan.

In disasters, hierarchy is both everywhere and irrelevant. Titles matter for decisions, but what survivors remember is whether help came with speed, humility and respect. What staff remember, especially those still finding their way in the system, is whether leaders listened. In those difficult days, I saw in Grynspan a quality too rare in international life: authority without arrogance. She did not treat the field as a backdrop for speeches. She treated it as the place where the UN’s promises were either kept or broken.

That is why I believe she should lead the UN when the next Secretary-General takes office in January 2027. The post demands more than prominence. It requires someone who understands development, diplomacy, management and crisis response as connected realities. Grynspan’s career has moved across precisely those worlds: Vice President of Costa Rica, senior UNDP leader, Secretary-General of the Ibero-American Conference, and head of UN Trade and Development. She has also been the first woman to lead UNCTAD, which matters in an organization that has never had a woman Secretary-General.

But my support is not simply about representation, important though that would be. It is about the kind of UN she could build. We live in a time when the institution is often accused of being remote, slow and trapped in official language. Yet the UN is at its best when it speaks to people in the languages of their grief, work, rights and hopes. A truly multilingual UN is not one that merely translates statements after they are drafted in diplomatic English. It is one that listens before it speaks.

Grynspan understands that. Her own profile is multilingual, but more importantly, her career has been spent moving between worlds: North and South, capitals and field offices, economics and human dignity. That matters because language is not decoration. Language is access. Language determines whether a mother understands a warning before a storm, whether a displaced family can claim assistance, whether an Indigenous community hears itself respected rather than patronized.

This is where I would hope a Grynspan-led UN would be bold. The world is losing languages at a frightening pace. Many of the most endangered languages are spoken by Indigenous peoples and small communities already facing climate change, displacement, poverty and political marginalization. When a language disappears, the loss is not only cultural. It is also a loss of memory, ecological knowledge, identity and belonging.

Under Grynspan, the UN could make language preservation part of development, climate adaptation, education, humanitarian response and digital inclusion. It could support community-led archives, train interpreters in endangered languages, fund mother-tongue education, and require crisis communications to reach people in the languages they actually use. It could treat linguistic survival as a human rights issue, not a sentimental side project.

Haiyan taught me that the UN’s credibility is built in the smallest encounters: the tent where people queue for help, the coordination meeting where a local official is finally heard, the translated message that saves a life. I believe Rebeca Grynspan knows this. She has the stature to negotiate with states, but also the temperament to remember the people behind the acronyms.

For the next Secretary-General, the UN does not need a louder voice. It needs a better listener. It needs someone who can make the organization not only multilingual in form, but humane in practice. Rebeca Grynspan is that leader.