Rita Missal is the Global Recovery Advisor a.i. for UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. Based in New York, Rita is a Post Disaster Recovery Practitioner with over 20 years of experience in the field of disaster recovery. She started her career in Disaster Management after the Super Cyclone in Odisha in 1999 at the UN office in Bhubaneswar and then after the Asian Tsunami in 2004, moved to the Maldives to manage the Disaster Recovery Programme there. Since 2007, Rita has been working in various positions in Geneva, Bangkok and in New York. Rita leads the UN partnership on conducting post disaster recovery assessments and in this capacity, she led the UN delegation in conducting assessments after Kerala floods in 2018 and 2020 Cyclone Fani in Odisha.

Rita’s key areas of expertise include disaster risk reduction, post disaster recovery, climate change, disaster displacements, and working with people with disabilities in crisis context.