Dr. Diaa AlJuneidi

Diaa leads Dunecrest' Socio-Economic Development practice. He is a strategy consultant, trainer, and executive coach with more than fifteen years of experience helping government agencies, educational institutions, and companies move from strategic intent to functioning structures. His distinguishing feature is that he works at both ends of the problem: he designs the strategy and the organisational architecture, and he then builds the leadership capability required to run it. That combination is unusual, and it reflects a career spent as much in the training room as in the boardroom.

Government advisory has been the constant thread. Across a portfolio spanning eight countries, he has advised ministries and agencies in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Turkey, the Comoros, Libya, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman on strategy and institutional reform, including support to delivery of the Saudi Vision 2030 programme. For one government agency he led the development of a comprehensive institutional strategy that was translated into costed and sequenced strategic plans for twenty-seven individual projects, working directly with agency leadership on prioritisation and delivery arrangements.

At Dunecrest he contributes to the firm's environmental and climate work alongside its social sector portfolio. He was part of the team behind the strategy for the Morooj environmental foundation under Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Environment, Water, and Agriculture, an assignment focused on how a nascent environmental social sector could be organised to contribute to national goals. He has also contributed to the firm's regional programme with the Global Green Growth Institute on private sector climate finance readiness across Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Oman. On the Islamic social finance side, he was part of the team that refined the operating model for an Awqaf bank intended to finance socio-economic infrastructure in Mecca and Medina for the General Authority for Awqaf, and he designed and led a structured benchmarking programme of waqf institutions in Malaysia for the Sulaiman Al Rajhi Charitable Foundation, coordinating high-level engagements and producing comparative analysis of operational and financial models.

His institutional turnaround work is where the results are most concrete. He led the full institutional transformation and repositioning of Baseerah International School in Malaysia, which was loss-making with weak governance and declining enrolment, designing and implementing new governance, academic, and operational systems and building a scalable growth model. The school reached sustained profitability and achieved both a four-star Ministry of Education rating and Cambridge accreditation. For a non-governmental organisation in Malaysia with minimal reach and weak operational capacity, he led the restructuring and programme scaling strategy that took it from a handful of programmes to hundreds annually across seven branches, supported by a volunteer base of more than six thousand. For a Malaysian food and beverage group he led a business expansion and transformation programme, launching new business lines and restructuring operations, supply chain, and marketing, expanding the group from one market to five. He is currently leading a management revamp and strategic planning initiative for a large educational organisation expanding into three African countries, and previously built the market expansion strategy that took a leading distributor into new markets across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Alongside the consulting, Diaa has spent more than fifteen years designing and delivering leadership development, having coached senior executives and emerging leaders in strategic thinking, problem solving, and decision making across the oil and gas, government, education, and food and beverage sectors, and having delivered workshops on strategic planning, organisational change, diplomacy, and risk management across Malaysia, the Gulf, Turkey, and Africa. He received the Distinguished Trainer Award in 2012 and is a certified trainer of trainers.

Diaa holds a Doctor of Business Administration in strategic management and a Master of Business Administration in strategic management, both from the International Islamic University Malaysia, where he also took his bachelor's degree in communications engineering with a minor in business administration. His doctoral and subsequent research has examined leadership, psychological wellbeing, and spirituality in management, and he has published on the prophetic leadership model in adult learning, on autonomy and psychological wellbeing, and on developing Muslim entrepreneurs. A Palestinian national based in Turkey, he works in Arabic and English, with good Turkish and conversational Malay.