Esteban Leon

Esteban Leon is the Head of the City Resilience Global Programme of UN-Habitat. He has a background in economics, finance, shelter/housing and settlements program design and management, capacity building, as well as building construction and reconstruction projects in post-crisis situations and urban resilience building. He has worked in the private sector (banking, microcredit and microfinance projects in Argentina and Bolivia), NGOs (slum upgrading, building constructions and reconstruction programmes in Bolivia and Kenya) and has been working for UN-Habitat since 2002 globally but based in Nairobi, Geneva, Panama and Barcelona. Esteban is the UN-Habitat representative for the Humanitarian Inter-Agency Standing Committee IASC, he is the Chair of the IASC Reference Group on Meeting Humanitarian Challenges in Urban Areas (MHCUA), he is also the Chair of the Medellin Collaboration for Urban Resilience (members: Rockefeller Foundation, RC100, C40, World Bank, UN-ISDR, IADB and others), UN-Habitat focal point for the International Recovery Platform, the Inter-Agency Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA), and the Post Conflict Needs Assessment (PCNA). He is also UN-Habitat’s global Focal point for the UN-Disaster Risk Reduction (UN-DRR). He has developed, fundraised, initiated and managed projects on Disaster Management and Post conflict shelter/housing and settlements recovery in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Pakistan, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, Georgia, Gaza, Haiti, El Salvador, Fiji &Samoa and lately Lebanon, Syria, Philippines and Ecuador operations. He is the UN-Habitat Head of the Urban Resilience Programme and Global Programme Manager of the “Making cities sustainable and resilient: Implementing the Sendai Framework for DRR 2015-2030 at the local level” joint Programme EC DG DEVCO/UN-ISDR & UN-Habitat and coordinating the implementation of the Programme in Asuncion, Dakar, Maputo and Port Vila.