Programme Manager. Resilience and Climate Change.
Delegation of the European Union to Zimbabwe
Giacomo Rambaldi is an independent consultant in the domains of digitalisation for agriculture participatory mapping and enterprise development. He has 41 years of professional experience in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Pacific and the Caribbean where he worked for various international organizations including the Technical Centre for Agricultural & Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), FAO and as long-term consultant on projects funded by the Italian Aid to Development and the European Commission. He holds an honours degree in agricultural sciences from the State University of Milan, Italy.
He worked for 17 years at CTA as a member of the Digitalisation for Agriculture (D4Ag) team where he coordinated and administered a stream of activities related to the deployment of D4Ag in Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries.
Alexandre Castellano.
Born in France on 16 May 1975.
Nationality: French and Italian
Education: MSc in Biology in Italy and MSc in Public Health Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Position: from 2020 to date - DG ECHO Head of Office - Pretoria - South Africa - for the Southern Africa and Indian Ocean Region.
Previous positions: from 2000 to 2012 working with various NGOs dealing with emergencies and innovation technologies in seven African countries – from 2013 to 2016 policy officer with ECHO in the head quarter dealing with Food Assistance, Nutrition, Cash-Based Transfers and Innovations. From 2016 to 2020, ECHO Technical Assistant for the Southern Africa and Indian Ocean Region.
Key interest: Innovative Technologies applied to humanitarian response.
Professional with more than 20 years of progressive experience in managing rights-based development projects in multiple sectors like health, nutrition, natural resource management, WASH, educations, skill development at District, State and National level.
I am a biologist (M.Sc. & PhD) and have been working with nature conservation, environment and climate change in Latin America and Africa for 30 years. I have been involved in numerous projects supporting circular, low carbon and climate resilient societies. They include capacity building of environmental authorities (Bolivia, Lesotho), climate smart coffee production (Uganda), greening of agricultural value chains (Tanzania, Kenya), watershed management (Kenya, Bolivia, Botswana), solar and wind farm development (Bolivia, Taiwan), management of non-timber forest products (Ecuador) as well as programming, reviews and evaluations (Peru, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Thailand, Malawi).
An important part of my work the last 10 years has been implementation of learning programmes and study tours with participants from Danida partner countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The programmes focus on mainstreaming environmental sustainability across sectors, and include Green Growth, Climate Change, Natural Resources Management and Disaster Risk Reduction.
Privately I am engaged in many related activities: I have a small organic farm, I am a local board member of the Danish Society for Nature Conversation, I am active with “greening” activities (e.g. energy and waste issues) in my village, and I have been appointed member of a "Committee on the sustainable and circular municipality", tasked with providing advice for our municipal council.
For more than 10 years, I have been a program manager at the Delegation of the European Union to Togo.
I was responsible for water and sanitation, transport, road maintenance and now the environment, climate change and biodiversity protection, mainly for actions taking place in Togo and West Africa.
