Deputy Executive Director, Association for Social Development and Aid Mobilization (ASAM)
Buket Bahar Dıvrak held her Bachelor’s Degree from Middle East Technical University, Department of Urban Planning in 2002 (Ankara, Türkiye), and received her Master’s Degree at the same university in the field of Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments in 2005.
She assumed her duties as ASAM Deputy Executive Director as of January 2019. She is responsible for leveraging strategic partnerships and fundraising operations in ASAM as well as supervising large-scale programs focusing on education, protection, irregular migration, women’s empowerment, skills development and social cohesion of refugee communities and vulnerable members of the Turkish society. As a part of the executive team, she supervises ASAM’s field operations across Türkiye. She is also supervising the activities of ASAM Greece representations.
Over her 24-year career, she has worked mainly with international and national NGOs and gained extensive practical and technical knowledge of the cross-sectoral nature of sustainable development, with a particular focus on social policies, by designing, implementing, and coordinating numerous medium- and large-scale programmes in Türkiye and the Mediterranean region.
She also has a thorough understanding of Türkiye’s social and economic policy frameworks, including humanitarian debates, migration policies and climate change. In addition, she has experience working closely with public institutions and has participated in several policy development processes at the national level, including critical law-making processes in the Turkish Parliament, thereby gaining substantial experience in public diplomacy and advocacy. She also worked as a consultant for the World Bank for two years and with the private sector in the field of sustainable development and business model transformation towards sustainability.
Ms. Dıvrak is mother of a daughter.