Leire Pajín

Leire Pajín Iraola (San Sebastián, September 16, 1976) is a Spanish sociologist and PSOE politician. She held the position of Minister of Health, Social Policy and Equality between October 2010 and December 2011, and Deputy Secretary General of the PSPV between April 2012 and July of that same year, when she announced that she was leaving active politics to work in the Pan American Health Organization.

In 2014 she began working as Director of Global Development at the Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) of Barcelona, a non-profit think tank supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. Since December 2020 she is the president of the international organization EU-LAC Foundation.

Early life and education
Pajín was born in San Sebastián but moved with her parents to Benidorm when she was a child. She graduated at the University of Alicante with a Sociology degree in 1998.

Career
In 2000 and 2004 Pajín was elected to the Congress of Deputies representing Alicante.

Although she had no professional experience outside her political party, Pajín was chosen to serve as the Secretary of State for International Cooperation and the President of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) from 2004 to 2008 in the first Zapatero government. In this capacity, she was involved in the development and approval of the Master Plan for Spanish Cooperation (2005-2008) that increased Spanish official development aid threefold to 0.5% of GDP. From 2007, she was a member of the World Bank Group’s High Level Advisory Council on Women's Economic Empowerment, which was chaired by Danny Leipziger and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul.

After serving as Minister of Health in 2010/11 Pajín remained deputy for Alicante.

In July 2012 Pajín announced that she would temporarily quit politics and consequently her seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Between 2012 and 2014, she served as Special Advisor to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and was a policy advisor to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Post-2015 Agenda team.

Other activities

 * OECD Development Centre on Latin America, Member of the advisory board on the Latin American Economic Outlook 2008