Bio-sketch of Mohammad Nurul Alam
Mohammad Nurul Alam was born and educated in Bangladesh. He earned his B.A. (Honors) and MA in Economics from Dhaka University and Master in Public Policy from Harvard University. He is a retired UN International Civil Servant and currently an Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at Columbia University in New York since 2010. Mr. Alam serves as a member of UNDP’s High-Level Independent Evaluation Advisory Panel (2022-25) of the Independent Office of Evaluation. He provides high level policy, advisory and evaluation services to a host of multilateral organizations including UNDP, UN ITC, IFAD, FAO, UNEG, and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB).
Trained as a development economist, he earned diverse applied experience in Strategic Planning, Development Programming, Project formulation and management, and development evaluation as a UN development practitioner. Starting his professional life as an Economist in the Ministry of Rural Development in Bangladesh in 1972, he moved on to teach as a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Dhaka University.
Mr. Alam dedicated most of his professional life as an International Civil Servant with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Starting his international UN career as an Assistant Resident Representative in UNDP in Afghanistan in 1980, he served as Assistant Regional Representative for Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei (1984-87) and then in Indonesia (1987-90), as the UNDP Deputy Resident Representative, managing a $ 200 million country programme. Thereafter, he was assigned as the Regional Representative for UNDP in the South Pacific based in Fiji (1991-93), covering the ten Island developing countries of Fiji, Solomon Island, Tonga, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Palau and Tuvalu . Mr. Alam was reassigned at UNDP Headquarters in New York in 1993 and retired from there as the Deputy Director of the Independent Evaluation office in 2009, after thirty four years of distinguished service in the United Nations.
In 2012, Mr. Alam was appointed as the Ambassador and Permanent Observer at the United Nations by the of the Intergovernmental Partners in Population and Development (PPD), one of the largest Intergovernmental-Interregional Organization comprising of 28 member Countries from Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. He completed his tenure at the UN in June 2018.
Mr. Alam is a committed volunteer for social service and development. He is the Executive Vice President of the Volunteers Association for Bangladesh (VAB), a US-based NGO dedicated to supporting quality education in rural Bangladesh. He was the Charter President of Rotary e-Club of Heritage New York, which supports social development projects in USA and other developing countries. He is also a member of the Harvard Club of New York.
Mr. Alam resides with his family in White Plains, New York.