My friend Una McCauley, who has died of cancer aged 54, was the United Nations resident coordinator in Sri Lanka. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has described Una as “strong and inspirational … humble and caring and incredibly generous with her time towards everyone. As the first woman to serve as resident coordinator in Sri Lanka, her steadfast commitment to encouraging women in leadership was remarkable.”
Una’s career as a humanitarian began when, teaching English in Spain in the late 1980s, she volunteered for Ipoderac, a charity for homeless children in Mexico. Later, after taking a master’s degree in development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (now Soas University of London), she was employed by Save the Children in Liberia.
On Easter Sunday 1996, rebels stormed the capital, Monrovia, and all foreign nationals were advised to leave. Una and her colleagues rounded up the local street children to places of safety before being evacuated by US Marines to Ivory Coast, where they ran an unauthorised operation to get pregnant women and children ashore from a boat full of Liberian refugees.
During the second Sudanese civil war, while working with Unicef as a protection officer, Una helped rescue more than 20,000 child soldiers from the rebels and reintegrate them into society.
Postings as Unicef representative to Togo (2006-10) and Panama (2010-13) followed, and she arrived in Sri Lanka in 2013. During the six years she served there “she earned the confidence and respect of all who knew her and worked with her”, the Sri Lankan president, Maithripala Sirisena, said.
Born Una Jensby in Northampton, the elder of two children of an Irish mother, Mary Dee McCauley, and an English father who left shortly after Una’s third birthday, she grew up in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, where her mother worked locally as a teacher.
Una attended Sion Manning school, then Ladbroke school, which she left with indifferent O-levels. She then went to Hammersmith and West London College, where she discovered boys, beer, music and politics. Her first job, at the British Library, bored her, so she went to East London Polytechnic, graduating in sociology and social research, before travelling to Spain as a teacher.
Una’s younger brother, Shem, a DJ and music producer, who had most success under the name Slacker, died in 2012. She is survived by her mother, and by Sam, Esther and Emmanuel, three Liberian siblings she adopted.
