Mohan Wickramasinghe

For Mohan Wickramasinghe, it was a childhood fascination with shipping and international trade, a major service sector in Sri Lanka which inspired his first job with the Port Agency Service before joining UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children in 2005 as a shipping assistant. 

Mohan (featured on the left of the image) is now a Supply and Logistics Officer with the global agency based in their Sri Lanka Country Office where his role involves planning procurement for a wide range of goods and services from medicines and medical equipment to vehicles and construction and security services. 

The work is incredibly meaningful to Mohan because of the positive, direct, and tangible impact it is having on the country’s economic and social development. This work includes engaging with UNICEF partners to review the country’s pharmaceutical supply chain system. This review, along with other major collaborations led to UNICEF securing much needed funding for the procurement and distribution of cold chain equipment and vaccines for Sri Lanka. 

“The last couple of years have been particularly difficult for Sri Lanka, and so the ability to help strengthen our country’s immunisation capacity, including its ability to receive, store and implement vaccinations not only against COVID-19 but also other vaccine preventable diseases has been a really rewarding part of my work”. 

In recent years, Mohan and his colleagues have been working on the development of a database of female-led businesses as part of the UNICEF’s Gender Responsive Procurement program. The database is designed to help increase the participation of female led organisations in UN procurement activities across Sri Lanka. 

Mohan credits mentoring and career coaching support from UNICEF colleagues and MBA studies including the courses he took with The Centre for Customs and Excise Studies as being both instructional and instrumental in paving new opportunities and pathways for applying his skills and knowledge. 

“It is a very competitive world, and it is getting more competitive every year. Do not stop learning. Keep your academic side active and keep adding and building on it. It will help you one day to get where you want in your career, and it will open more doors than you could imagine.” 

Mohan Wickramasinghe is Supply Chain Officer with the UNICEF Sri Lanka Country Office. 

Mohan studied his MBA in International Trade and Logistics with the University of Sri Jayewardenepura which was a CCES delivery partner between 2010-2015. Mohan enrolled in ten CCES subjects including International Customs Law, International Commercial Transaction Law, Classification of Internationally Traded Merchandise and International Regulation of International Property Rights.