Fabian McKinnon
Programme Director
Fabian McKinnon’s career in international development spans over thirty years. He has worked as a development practitioner leading technical cooperation programmes for the United Nations on the ground in Cameroon, Ecuador, Armenia, the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, the occupied Palestinian territories and Rwanda. He has also worked as Senior Adviser, Strategic Planning, to the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, and as Chef de Cabinet of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in London.
From 2001 to 2006 he was the first Executive Vice-President of the Vaccine Fund/GAVI, the world’s largest child immunisation alliance launched by Bill Gates with a donation of $1.5 billion. During this time the Vaccine Fund also created the ground-breaking International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IIFIm), an award-winning, powerful mechanism to finance child immunisation and accelerate the development of vaccines. In 2005 UK Chancellor Gordon Brown and President Chirac of France selected the Vaccine Fund to implement it. Since then, IFFIm has disbursed $2.6 billion to immunise 700 million of the world’s poorest children in 73 countries, contributing to saving more than 13 million lives.
Most recently Fabian worked closely with SIDS in the Pacific as Deputy Director-General Programmes of the Pacific Community (SPC). In that capacity he was responsible for the $100M development programme that the Pacific Community implements in 22 Pacific island countries, leading a team of some 450 staff that provide multisectoral scientific and technical advice.
Fabian holds degrees in Political Science, International Relations and International Law. He speaks English, French, Spanish and Italian fluently.
