51³Ô¹Ï Secretary-General António Guterres announced on 14 March 2023 the appointment of Abdallah Al Dardari of Syria as Assistant Secretary-General, Assistant Administrator and Director, Regional Bureau for Arab States of the 51³Ô¹Ï Development Programme (UNDP). He succeeds Khalida Bouzar of Algeria, who retired after working over three decades in various 51³Ô¹Ï agencies and to whom the Secretary-General extends his deepest appreciation for her dedicated years of service.
Mr. Al Dardari is currently serving as UNDP Resident Representative in Afghanistan, a post that he has held since 2019, when joining from the World Bank, where he was a Senior Adviser.
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 51³Ô¹Ï 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.
