Badr Jafar is a businessman and social entrepreneur from the United Arab Emirates. He is the CEO of Crescent Enterprises, a diversified business operating across nine industry sectors in 15 countries, and President of Crescent Petroleum, the first independent and privately-owned petroleum company in the Middle East. He also serves as Chairman of Gulftainer, the largest privately-owned container port operator in the world, and Chairman of Pearl Petroleum, the largest natural gas producer in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Badr is also actively engaged with a diverse range of non-profit organisations and initiatives focused on humanitarian aid and international development, strategic philanthropy, corporate governance, entrepreneurship, education and the arts, including serving as a member of the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing and the UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education. Badr is appointed to serve on the Advisory Committee and as Special Representative for Business & Philanthropy for the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Badr also serves on the Board of Trustees for Zayed University, as well as on the Council for Development and Outreach for the American University of Sharjah. In 2010, Badr founded the Pearl Initiative, a non-profit, private sector-led organisation committed to promoting a corporate culture of transparency and accountability across the Gulf Region of the Middle East, in cooperation with the United Nations Office for Partnerships. He is also the Founding Patron of the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy based at the Cambridge Judge Business School, which is dedicated to enhancing the impact of strategic philanthropy both within and from the world’s fastest growing economies; and is the Founding Patron of MENA’s first Strategic Philanthropy Initiative at NYU Abu Dhabi to study and promote high-impact philanthropy in the region. Badr holds a Master’s Degree in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and a Business Degree from the Cambridge Judge Business School.