Moez Doraid, Regional Director, a.i. East and Southern Africa
Dr. Moez Doraid (Egypt), is the Regional Director, a.i. East and Southern Africa since April 2021.
Dr. Moez has held progressively responsible positions in the UN system over three decades across several agencies and regions. He is currently serving the dual functions of Director for East and Southern Africa as well as Director, Division of Management and Administration, United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). For most of the past year he has served as the Regional Director a.i. for Arab States, UN Women. In this capacity he led the formulation and implementation of UN Women’s strategy to support Arab governments and societies in their emergency response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic by advancing women’s rights and leveraging innovation to build back better.
At the corporate level, he has enhanced the effectiveness and efficiency of UN Women’s operations cutting costs and simplifying procedures and helped shape and execute UN Women’s operational rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2010 to 2015 he has managed the implementation of UN Women’s system-wide and interagency mandate also serving as the Co-Chair of the Consultative Group on Combatting Discrimination and Inequality of the UN’s High Level Committee on Programme (HLCP) and the Chair of the UN Development Group’s Task Team for Gender Equality.
Between 2007 and 2010, Moez served as the Deputy Executive Director, Partnerships, Resource Mobilization and Operations of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) overseeing the tripling of both the Fund’s revenue and delivery. He was the main UNIFEM interlocutor in the intergovernmental and interagency negotiations that led to the establishment of UN Women. Moez also served for three terms as the Chair of the UN Development Group’s Working Group on Programming Issues which provided interagency global guidance and direction to UN common programming at the country level.
Before joining UNIFEM, Moez served as UN Resident Coordinator/UNDP Resident Representative in Kuwait where he led the UN System’s support to Kuwaiti women in winning their suffrage rights. During 2004 - 2005, he was the UN Humanitarian Coordinator, UN Resident Coordinator a.i. and UNDP’s Officer in Charge in Maldives. As RC, he commissioned and managed a historic mission that produced a seminal report that became a major impetus for the country’s progress towards democratization and advancement of human rights. Following the 2004 tsunami, he coordinated international assistance to the relief and recovery effort playing a key role in mobilizing substantial foreign assistance to the Island nation.
Earlier in his career, Moez was as a Senior Advisor, Regional Bureau for Arab States, UNDP headquarters. In this capacity he was a co-author of the first seminal Arab Human Development Report. Prior, Moez established and headed UNDP's Regional Resource Facility for Arab States; managed research and policy analysis as Deputy Director of UNDP’s Office of Development Studies, coauthoring UNDP’s seminal book on Global Public Goods. In the 1990s, he coauthored six of UNDP’s Global Human Development Reports and before that served as Assistant Resident Representative, UNDP, Sudan where he managed participatory poverty reduction programmes serving half a million people in Kordofan, war stricken Darfur and southern Sudan.
Before joining UNDP, Doraid served as a Diplomatic Attachè with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has a B.A. in Economics from the American University in Cairo; a Masters in Public Administration focusing on economic development from Harvard University; and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Lebanese University.