Syria

Working in EU Public Diplomacy since 2006: as an EU diplomat, press officer, communication manager, EU project team leader and as a strategic communication expert.
Since October 2025, Associate Director of Strategic Communication at the European Policy Center.
Founding staff of the European Endowment for Democracy.
7+ years Damascus and Kyiv.
Active in pan-European political party Volt Europa.
Political Science degrees from Yale, SciencesPo-Paris and Free University-Berlin, and Harvard certificate in "Leadership and Community Organising".
Author of “EU Public Diplomacy in an ever-changing world” (University of Southern California).
uscpublicdiplomacy.org/story/new-cpd-perspectives-eus-public-diplomacy

A Master Degree Holder thoroughly familiar with various aspects of procurement, administration and management in both the private and public sectors, and in a highly professional and multi-language (Arabic, English, and French) environment.
Long experience in operations, procurement, logistics, administration and projects management,
Ability to handle organised knowledge, and to scan the organisational and subject matter environment,
Ability to work with senior people in a substantive way, applying interpersonal and organisational skills and maintaining productive relations with staff and people from other units and agencies,
Ability to manage various teams, assessing conflicting demands, determining priorities, following-up, ensuring that work is done correctly, meeting goals and on time.
I completed the following Certificates:
Strategic Diploma in Public Procurement, CIPS 4
The Leadership Development Pathway
Working at UNDP in Countries under crisis conditions, such as Syria and Lebanon, I was able to operate over a multitude of portfolios, projects and agencies, including the projects under fast track and those dealing with the Syrian crisis, with initiatives to resolve complex cases and fast effective delivery of Projects’ milestones.
With over 20 years of professional procurement experience, including 2 years’ experience as International Procurement Specialist at the UNDP Syria Office and 10 years of experience serving as the head of procurement unit at the UNDP Lebanon Country Office, I have directly supervised the offices procurement teams and managed the procurement processes of portfolios of several subprojects worth 100 of millions of dollars.
With the start of the Syrian crisis, I managed to adapt to the sudden increase in work volume whereby the UN is engaged in one of the largest crisis response operations in the world. From an average yearly delivery of around 20 million USD per year prior to the Syrian crisis, I managed the procurement operations worth around 65 million USD of delivery per year. This covers procurement related to small, medium, ad large scale physical infrastructure project, individual consultancies, as well as medium and large-scale services projects. This has contributed to the positioning of UNDP at the forefront of the response to the implications of the Syrian crisis
In the course of the challenging recent 4 years at the Banking Sector in Lebanon, and through my commitment and dedication, I was able to handle the extraordinary workload and huge number of administrative processes, despite the continuous new introduced changes to procedures and market crisis situation.
All tasks that I handled and managed at UNDP and then at the private sector, entailed dedicated efforts in executing transactions until reaching the requested results and outputs.

I am a trained journalist and evaluation expert, data specialist and experienced project manager with 18 years of general professional experience, out of which five years working as a journalist, six years managing projects and tenders (mainly with EU agencies), and eight years working as an independent evaluation expert, data and knowledge management specialist. Currently working for the technical assistance Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning and Design for External Action (meldea) providing support to DG INTPA, DG NEAR and service FPI, previously with the Evaluation Support Service (ESS) of DG INTPA.

Joaquin, director of To the core of things, is a monitoring, evaluation, researcher and programme manager of multimillion regional programmes and projects specialised in human rights, media, gender, community tourism and children/youth.

As the director and principal consultant of To the core of things consultancy firm, I bring over two decades of experience in results-based management, monitoring, and evaluation of international development programs, with a deep familiarity with EU and UNEG norms and standards. Throughout my career, I have developed and refined evaluation systems, policies, and related guidance for various DGs, national authorities, international NGOs and UN agencies. My work spans multiple regions, including Africa, Latin America, and Asia, focusing on human rights, media, gender, and education and youth programs. Notably, I have led strategic consultancies for different EU instruments including EIDHR, the EU social fund and also outside the EU for UNESCO and OHCHR. These consultancies focused on monitoring, evaluation, and reporting functions of international organizations including the assessment of these functions of UN agencies, OECD, the Council of Europe and the European Union.

My methodological expertise includes mixed-methods approaches and quasi-experimental designs that emphasise client and partner ownership, coherence with learning curves, and pragmatic solutions. These tools, developed under the Creative Commons IP from To the Core of Things, include research guidelines, organisational capacity assessment, modular reconstruction and adaptation of theories of change, stakeholder network maps methodologies, case study guidelines and approaches, outcome harvesting through Most Significant Change stories and implementation of machine learning approaches to development cooperation programmes.

The principles I apply in all my works are ownership of the works and the processes by the client and partners (through a strong participatory approach); alignment with latest trends in the field (including ICT4D, statistical techniques and humanistic considerations); coherence with the learning curve of the clients, and; pragmatism, proposing solutions in line with the interests, philosophy and capacities of the clients and its partners.

Key relevant work that reflects this range of skills and passions include ROM reviews for multi-country EU programmes, consultancies for UNESCO (evaluaitons, periodic reporting consultancies or MEAL system TA). Also for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) I have developed as well another strategic consultancy assessing their in-house monitoring and reporting function plus other programme and country evaluations. Other donors, include USAID, with consultancies carried for US Internews setting up the methodologies, managing seven multicultural teams and producing seven research products for their Rooted in Trust programme and leading several programme evaluations. Some other relevant examples of my works are the evaluation of an agriculture cooperative based project in Ethiopia funded by NORAD, the evaluation of a community radios programme in Zambia funded by the Netherlands; the research manager position for ECORYS and also academic publications in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation.

For more information visit https://tothecoreofthings.consulting; check our track of projects.