Abdallah Al Dardari

Assistant Secretary-General, Assistant Administrator and Director of the Regional Bureau for Arab States, UNDP

Mr. Abdallah Al Dardari is the Assistant Secretary-General, Assistant Administrator and Director, Regional Bureau for Arab States of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He started his professional career in 1986 as an international affairs writer and bureau chief of the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, and then became the Economist at the London Office of the League of Arab States. From 1994 to 1997, he served as Programme Officer at the UNDP Syria country office and then joined the Arab Trade Financing Programme/Arab Monetary Fund group as Chief of the Trade Promotion section. In 2003, he was appointed Chairman of the State Planning Commission in Syria, a function he held until 2005, when he became Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs. He further served as Chief Economist with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia in 2011 and, later, Deputy Executive Secretary, where he led efforts to understand conflict dynamics in the Arab region. Mr. Al Dardari holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Richmond College in the United Kingdom, a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Southern California, in the United States, and an interdisciplinary PhD in post-conflict reconstruction from Università Iuav di Venezia, in Italy. He also studied international relations at the London School of Economics. He is fluent in Arabic, English and French, with an understanding of Russian and Turkish.