Stephen Cutts

Former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, Commonwealth Assistant Secretary-General and OECD Chef de Cabinet

Early life and education[]

Stephen Cutts (born 1964 in Bromley, England) has served in a number of leadership roles in Intergovernmental and not for profit organisations. Stephen has a First Class Honours degree in American Studies and English Literature from the University of Keele, a PGCE from Lancaster University, an Executive MBA from INSEAD and an Honorary Doctorate from Keele University.

Career[]

Following earlier careers as an insurance underwriter and broker, Stephen joined the Export Credits Guarantee Department as a Fast Stream civil servant in November 1994. He was quickly promoted to lead negotiations for the UK Government within the EU and at the OECD on medium term export credit issues. Stephen joined the Export Credits Deprtment of the Trade Directorate in the OECD in 1996. He successfully negotiated the first agreement to limit government support for export credits that had adverse environmental impacts. He also negotiated the first international agreement aimed at to precluding export credit support for contracts won through bribery.

In 2000, Stephen was recruited to the Office of the Secretary-General of the OECD to head the office of one of the Deputy Secretaries-General. In this role, he established (and raised the necessary funding for) the organisation's Policy Coherence for Development programme, to bridge the silos across different policiy areas and committees, that were leading to government recommendations inconsistent with their stated development objectives.

In 2005, Secretary-General Donald Johnston promoted Stephen to become Chef de Cabinet of the OECD. In this role, as well as supporting and being the chief adviser to the Secretary-General, Stephen raised questions about the governance structure of the OECD, which had not changed since its role of distributing Marshall Plan funds after the Second World War. This had left a legacy where Member States were spending more on oversight of the OECD than the entire costs of the Secretariat, and a system that was unsuited to the modern work of the organisation.

In 2007, after a short period as Deputy Executive Director, Stephen left the OECD and joined INSEAD, in Fontainebleau, France, as its Executive Director of the African Initiative, an initiative of the Dean. In this role, Stephen designed ways to attract more students to INSEAD from the African continent and identify partnerships with commercial organisations and other academic institutions to enhance INSEAD’s brand awareness in Africa and introduce case studies in the continent to the school’s curriculum.

In 2008, Stephen joined the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. Stephen served first as Director of Strategic Planning and Evaluation at the Commonwealth Secretariat, and then as Commonwealth Assistant Secretary-General for Corporate Affairs. In this position, he was in charge of the administration, finance, strategic planning and human resources matters.^[1] In 2009, working with the Chair of the Executive Committee, Steve designed and secured agreement of all Commonwealth member countries to a scale of contributions based on the principles of capacity to pay, shared ownership of the organisation and mutual accountability. This issue, which had become a major financial risk, placed the organisation onto a sustainable financial footing. As Assistant Secretary-General, Stephen spearheaded a major programme of institutional reform across all corporate areas, including funding, risk management, financial rules and budget structure, staff rules and benefits. And in 2012, working with the Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, he led the development and negotiation of the Commonwealth Charter, which was finally signed by the Queen.

In 2013, Stephen joined the United Nations as Assistant Secretary-General for the Office of Central Support Services in the Department of Management. He was appointed to this position by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 3 April 2013.^[2] In addition to overseeing and driving reforms to modernise UN practices across a wide-ranging and multi-billion dollar global management portfolio, including procurement, property management, travel, and business continuity, Stephen led the project to introduce flexible workplace in New York. As a result of its successful implementation office space at UN Headquarters was redesigned to meet the needs of the workforce (whether for collaborative work, meeting spaces or individual analysis) in an optimal. The project also saved the United Nations more than $20 million per year by enabling it to give up leasing office space in New York.

In 2017, Stephen chose to leave the UN to become CEO of Reach to Teach, an education charity funded by Larry Ellison and working in the poorest rural areas of the Indian State in Gujarat. During the next two and a half years, working in London and India, Stephen led the transformation of the organisation, from working alone in fewer than 200 primary schools, to instituting a partnership with the Gujarat Government, thereby bringing systemic improvements in foundational literacy and numeracy to the education of millions of children in the 32,000 primary schools across the state.

Today, Stephen splits his time between Sussex in the UK and New York. He serves as a Member of the Oversight Advisory Committee of UNFPA (The UN Population Fund); an Associate of Llewellyn Consulting/Independent Economics (a consortium of independent experts providing strategic analysis and advisory services to senior asset managers and business leaders); a trustee of Tusome Africa (an education charity working in Uganda); and a trustee of the Ramphal Institute (which works on issues of concern to the Commonwealth in the areas of social and economic policy, governance and the environment). Stephen has also been recruited by Grant Thornton as an external consultatnt to work on ESG projects.

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