Hassan Damluji

TEDxArendal 2023 talk:

Meet the brilliant Hassan Damluji – a mastermind in the topic of global affairs, leadership, and transformation! As a co-founder of Global Nation, a think tank rewriting the book of international collaboration, Hassan is at the forefront of reimagining how the world works together. His advice is sought by institutions like the Gates Foundation, WHO, and national governments, propelling solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges.

Speaker Bio:

Hassan is a senior executive, advisor and author on global affairs, with a track record of building and leading teams, organizations and large-scale initiatives, working in complex stakeholder environments. He is a co-founder of Global Nation, a think/do-tank aimed at improving global cooperation. Global Nation advises the world’s leading institutions working on tackling humanity’s greatest challenges, including the Gates Foundation, WHO, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Wellcome Trust, and national governments. It also receives grant funding to pursue thought-leadership and movement-building for a fairer international system.

Hassan is a senior advisor to the WHO Assistant Director-General for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, helping him to create the new Berlin Pandemics Hub, and strengthen global pathogen genomic systems. He is also a Visiting Senior Fellow in International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he engages with an expert academic community to develop concrete solutions to international challenges. Hassan spent a decade at the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy, where he served as Deputy Director for Global Policy and Advocacy. He built a range of large-scale development initiatives and was closely involved in global policy responses, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was also responsible for the foundation’s geographic teams for the Middle East, Pakistan and East Asia and advised Bill and Melinda Gates on their engagement in those countries. Prior to joining the Gates Foundation, Hassan spent 5 years at McKinsey where he led transformations in education and economic development in Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain.

Hassan has written extensively about global development and politics. His first book, The Responsible Globalist, was published by Penguin Allen Lane in 2019. It was described by Bill Gates as “thoughtful and well written”, by Riz Ahmed as “visionary” and by Richard Curtis as “the book I would have written if I was smart enough”.

Hassan serves on several boards, including the Education for Employment Foundation and the One Degree Academy (a school in London he co-founded in his personal capacity, and which is rated “Outstanding” by the government).

He holds a double-first class B.A. from Oxford with 3 university prizes, and an M.A. from Harvard, where he was awarded the Von Clemm Fellowship.