Provisional Acceptance from Nicola Crosta

Speakers Corner: Provisional Acceptance from Nicola Crosta (To be confirmed) 

Nicola Crosta from UNDP/UNCDF has provisionally agreed to be one of the keynote speakers in the session on "Partnerships for Change" at the IRN Forum on August 28th. He will talk about partnerships/governance issues across countries and refer to the pretty innovative North-South partnership model he is applying to a small NGO he manages in Thailand, called ‘Kids Home’, which deals with children aged 1 to 18 from difficult family situations (www.kids-home.org). The latter is a very flexible, international partnership of private donors, based on mutual trust, with very low administrative costs.  

Nicola is currently Chief Technical Officer with the UN, working with the UNDP/UNCDF and based in Cambodia. He was formerly Head of the OECDs Rural Development Programme, and he has worked on territorial development and public governance since 1998. While at OECD he had the main responsibility for coordinating reviews on territorial rural policy in a range of countries including China, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Canada, Finland, and Scotland. He was also in charge of producing the OECD paper the ‘New Rural Policy Paradigm’ in 2006. He is Chairman of the NGO Kids Home, based in Thailand. Nicola was educated at MIT, and took his Masters in Public Administration at the Institut d'Etudes politiques de Paris and his MBA from the ESCP in Madrid/Oxford.