LocationsDeena Patel is a Global Fund Portfolio Manager with UNDP Afghanistan, currently managing a $66 million grant covering HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and health system strengthening. Over more than 20 years with UNDP, she has worked across legal, policy, and programme roles in New York, and across country and regional posts including Zimbabwe, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia, Türkiye, and Afghanistan.
The Call I Almost Missed: Deena's Journey to the Heart of Global Health
September 14, 2026
Deena (third from right) at the opening of the ICU ward at Balkh Hospital with former UNDP Afghanistan Resident Representative Stephen Rodrigues (far left) and colleagues, Afghanistan, December 2024.
Photo: UNDP Afghanistan
When I was 11, I was selected for a programme called Children’s International Summer Villages (CISV), a small nonprofit founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, built on one simple idea: bring children from different countries together, let them build friendships, and create lasting peace.
I spent a month in the Netherlands as one of the American delegates, surrounded by kids from a dozen different countries who spoke different languages, ate different food. Once you got past all of that, it felt like they could have grown up in the house next door.” Something about that realization, that we had so much more in common than what set us apart, never left me. I kept going back. At 16, as a junior counsellor in Canada. At 21, leading a delegation to Brazil. At 25, hosting a village of my own, this time in New York.
Looking back, I can trace a fairly straight line from that month in the Netherlands to the work I do today, managing a health portfolio across borders, cultures, and crises. I didn’t know it then. But at 11 years old, in a peace camp in the Netherlands, I was already building the life I was going to live.
Five Dollars and a Belief
My parents were born and raised in India. In the 1970s, the United States was offering visa incentives to Indian doctors and dentists willing to relocate and practise there, and my father, freshly qualified as a dentist, took the leap. He came to New York first, alone, sat the exams needed to relicense, and once he had rebuilt his credentials from scratch, brought my mother over to join him. He still says he arrived with five dollars in his pocket.
From that, they built an entire life. My sister and I grew up with a version of the American dream our parents had made real through sheer persistence, and, true to a value I’ve seen echoed across so many Indian families, education sat at the centre of everything. It wasn’t simply encouraged, it was assumed: you study, you work hard, and you make the absolute most of every door that opens for you. That belief came before anything material. That anything is possible if you work hard. That you don’t make excuses. That you show up. And then, when you’ve made something of yourself, you give back.
I carry that with me every day, even now in Kabul.
There’s a memory from high school I still return to. I was a student ambassador, one of a small group chosen to represent my school on a three-week trip through Europe. One of our stops was the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. I remember standing there, in the Palais des Nations, looking up at that long row of flags representing every member state, and thinking to myself, almost unconsciously: this is where I want to work.
I didn’t get there quickly. But I remember exactly what it felt like, years later, holding my own UN laissez-passer, the pale blue passport, for the first time. I gathered my friends in our tiny New York City apartment that evening just to show them and to celebrate. That feeling, of having finally made it after years persistence, uncertainty, and a career I hadn’t fully mapped out yet, has stayed with me ever since.
That feeling never really left.
My father’s first dental placard at my grandfather’s house in India (left) Mom and dad visiting UN HQ.
Photo: Deena Patel
Two Phone Calls, Twenty Years
I started college on the pre-med track, as a lot of children of Indian immigrants do. My sister stayed the course. I didn’t. About halfway through, I switched to law, deciding medicine wasn’t going to be my path, and never looked back.
By law school, I had applied to what felt like hundreds of UN internships, UNDP, UNICEF, every acronym I could find, and heard back from exactly none of them. So, I accepted a legal fellowship with New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation instead and got on with things.
Then, out of nowhere, UNDP’s Office of Legal Procurement and Support called. A short conversation, and then an offer: an internship. I had already committed to the fellowship, so I said I was sorry, but I had to decline. I hung up the phone and called my roommate, Vicky, who is still my closest friend more than twenty years later, to tell her what I had just done.
She didn’t hesitate. “What are you doing? That’s your dream job. Call them back.”
So, I did, maybe ten minutes later. Too late. They had already offered the internship to someone else.
It could have ended right there, a door that opened once and closed before I ever walked through it. But the woman I had spoken with was kind, and we found a way to make it work anyway: a fall internship instead, in UNDP’s legal department. That is how I first walked into UNDP, through a door I thought I had already closed.
When I graduated, I had a plan, or something close to one: a master’s degree in human rights law, maybe a year of travel first. My supervisor had a different idea. “I have a friend on the HIV team,” she said. “She needs a lawyer for three months, to cover a maternity leave. Why don’t you try it and see what happens?”
I tried it.
That was twenty years ago. Three months turned into two decades of work at the intersection of HIV, human rights, and global health: first in New York, then at the regional level, and now on the ground in Afghanistan, where I manage a $66 million Global Fund grant covering HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and health system strengthening, with a team of 30. I didn’t build this career alone. Along the way, I was fortunate to have mentors—many of them strong women—who opened doors, encouraged me to walk through them, and helped me see possibilities I might not have seen for myself.
HIV, Health, and Development (HDD) team holding flags of their respective nationality in UNDP HQ in New York
Photo: Deena Patel
A $66 Million Responsibility
People often ask what I actually do in Afghanistan, and the honest answer takes longer than a sentence. As Global Fund Portfolio Manager, I am managing a $66 million grant that funds HIV, tuberculosis and malaria programming, and broader health system strengthening across the country, with a smaller component on climate and health. It sits inside one of UNDP’s largest global partnerships: in 2025, UNDP was managing Global Fund grants in 23 countries, with a combined portfolio of more than $1.6 billion, so the scale and the scrutiny that come with it are real.
Day to day, that means representing UNDP in high-level meetings with Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health and the Global Fund, coordinating with UN agency partners like WHO and UNICEF on funding and delivery, and keeping a team focused inside one of the most demanding operating environments in the world.
No two days look alike, and that unpredictability is baked into the job, even if it never makes it into a job description. If you want to imagine what a day in this job might look like, it could start with sitting down at my desk to learn that two million malaria bed nets are stuck at the border with Pakistan, held up by conflict between the two countries, trying to figure out how to reroute them and what it will cost. Before that conversation even progresses, the ground might start to shake: an earthquake, and with it, hours spent checking on our health facilities and reaching our partners to make sure everyone is accounted for and safe. Then it would be back to my desk for a call with the Ministry of Public Health to negotiate a new ban on methadone, an issue with potentially serious consequences for people who use drugs, many of whom depend on our programmes for treatment; then an interagency meeting with UNICEF and WHO negotiating funding that never quite stretches far enough; a check-in with the country office; and, then, sirens indicating a bunker drill: helmets on, protective gear on, and a run to safety.
I describe it to people as a game of Whack-a-Mole. You solve one problem and two more appear. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s a Tuesday.
What keeps me going through days like that is watching my colleagues, Afghan and international staff alike, show up every single morning, fully committed to making people’s lives better in one of the hardest places in the world to do this work. That daily commitment genuinely inspires me. If you can make this work here, you can make it work anywhere.
UNDP Afghanistan Global Fund Team
Photo: UNDP Afghanistan
What the Law Taught Me and What It Didn’t
I grew up believing the law exists to protect people. That was the whole premise. It’s the reason I became a lawyer in the first place.
What I’ve discovered doing this work is that it’s not that simple. You have progressive, protective laws sitting on the books, unimplemented, unknown to the communities they were written for, unenforced by the officials meant to uphold them. And then you have laws that criminalize the very people we’re trying to serve: sex workers, drug users, transgender people, men who have sex with men, people living with HIV, and the list goes on. Laws being used as instruments of exclusion rather than protection.
Learning to hold both of those truths at once, that the law can be both good and bad, and that our job is to strengthen the former and reform the latter, took me some time to fully reconcile with the reality of the work. I had to get less naive. I had to accept that change is slower and messier than I believed back in law school, when I was certain good law simply meant good outcomes.
But I’ve also seen what’s possible when you stay at this long enough.
Years ago, while managing a $10.5 million regional Global Fund grant across ten African countries, I helped expand the Africa Judges Forum, growing directly out of the recommendations of UNDP’s Global Commission on HIV and the Law. The idea was straightforward, and at the time, unusual: bring Supreme Court judges from across the continent together with lawyers and parliamentarians to work directly on HIV, human rights, and access to justice for the communities most affected, and use strategic litigation to reform the discriminatory legislation still on the books in roughly half of Africa’s countries. A judge’s decision doesn’t stay in the courtroom. It shapes how a law gets interpreted and enforced long after the ruling, all the way down to community level, so working with judges directly, and giving them a shared network and a shared set of resources, meant a single legal decision could ripple much further than anything I could manage from a desk in New York.
Alongside the judges, we built a companion expert group of around 40 key population representatives to advise them directly, making sure the people affected by these laws had a genuine seat in shaping them, not just a case file describing their circumstances.
Last year marked the Forum’s tenth anniversary. More than 100 judges are now part of it, and the model has been replicated in Arab states, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.
That took years. But it’s real, and it lasts.
Presenting at International AIDS Conference, Amsterdam, 2018
Photo: Deena Patel
My Team, My Peloton
I’ve been athletic since I was a small girl. Soccer from the age of six. My first marathon at 25, right after law school, in Hawaii, followed by New York City (2x), Paris, and Arizona. When I turned 30, I started Ironman triathlons: two full ones, in the US and South Africa, plus a handful of half-distance races in New York, Dubai, South Africa, and Turkey. Then Machu Picchu, Kilimanjaro. For me, physical challenges and professional goals have always worked the same way: set a target, work toward it, don’t stop until you get there.
When I arrived in Afghanistan, someone suggested we start a women’s football team for the Interagency UN Games, the closest thing the UN has to its own Olympics. There isn’t much else to do on the compound, so we said yes. We had girls at every level, some who had never kicked a ball before, training alongside a few of us who had played for years. We trained three times a week, ran together in the mornings, and had coaches from the men’s team helping us along. Months of that work took us to Costa Brava, in Spain, for the tournament, where we won the gold medal. So did our men’s team.
Picture of the winning Afghanistan Women’s Football Team (UN Games, 2024)
Photo:UNDP Afghanistan
It remains one of my favourite memories from twenty years at the UN: country offices and headquarters team from across the organization together in one place, competing hard by day and celebrating together at night, the best version of what this organization can be.
A few weeks ago, I felt that exact same feeling again, somewhere I didn’t expect to find it. My team and I were in Istanbul, finalizing our next Global Fund proposal for $59 million: hundreds of documents, months of work, late nights, and endless revisions—all culminating in one final submission. . When we finally clicked submit, the whole room stood up, cheering. It was the same feeling as that gold medal. A team working hard toward something difficult, and succeeding together. Moments like that don’t come often. When they do, they’re everything. Teamwork at its best.
Our Administrator once described UNDP as his peloton: the team that pushes you, carries you, and holds you up when you need it. I read that and thought, yes. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what my team is to me.
It’s also, I think, part of why I’ve learned to carry the weight of this work. I’ve always believed that physical health and mental health are connected, that you can’t look after one and neglect the other. In Afghanistan, that belief gets tested daily. We live and work on the same compound: there’s no commute, no door to walk through at the end of the day that separates work from home. The hours run 12 to 14 hours most days, weekends included.
What keeps me standing is deliberately simple. I run regularly, the same loop, because the predictability matters more than the distance. I have dinner with colleagues who understand exactly what the day has been like, without needing it explained. I protect time with my partner. And I check in with myself, honestly, about how I’m doing and what I actually need, rather than what I think I should need. There’s no single right way to carry this kind of weight. Some colleagues spend weekends alone, cooking, resting, watching something, fully switching off; that’s just as valid. What matters is that you find what works for you, and that you actually do it, because the weight doesn’t put itself down on its own. The women in Afghanistan whose choices shrink further every year. The patients whose treatment depends on which side of a border a shipment lands on. You carry that. You set it down deliberately, so that you can pick it back up again tomorrow.
Running at the NYC marathon, 2015
Photo: Deena Patel
I’m Glad I Called Back
UNDP isn’t perfect. It never has been, and it never will be. But I believe it’s more necessary right now than at almost any point in my career. Believing in the work has also meant accepting the sacrifices that come with it: time away from family and friends, missed milestones, and a life that has often been lived in places far from home.
But we’ve made remarkable gains against HIV, TB, and malaria over the past two decades, gains I’ve watched happen up close. And right now, I’m watching some of that progress slip backward, because funding is being cut. People who were stable on treatment are coming off it. Less than half the world has access to essential health services today, not because we lack the tools, the knowledge, or the evidence, but because we lack the political will and the funding to put them to use.
Health isn’t a luxury. It doesn’t check whether you’re rich or poor, educated or not. At some point, you will face a health crisis, and so will someone you love. What we’re fighting for, at the most basic level, is the right of every person to have support standing there when that moment comes.
That’s what gets me out of bed in Kabul every morning.
That, and the people. Colleagues from twenty years ago are still some of my closest friends today. UNDP attracts a certain kind of person, someone who genuinely wants to make things better, and being surrounded by that, every single day, is a privilege I try never to take for granted, even on the hardest days.
So, if you’re standing where I once stood, wondering whether this path is worth taking: get involved. Volunteer. Work on your languages. Take risks. Be curious. Say yes to the assignment that scares you a little, because you will never feel fully ready, and that has never once been a good enough reason to wait.
Twenty years ago, I could have let that phone ringing. I could have stayed in New York, kept the fellowship, and built a comfortable, predictable life as a lawyer, never thinking twice about it.
I’m glad I called back.
Preparing for bunker drill, Kabul, 2022
Photo: UNDP Afghanistan
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