Mr. Gabriel Grau is the USAID’s Mission Director for Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Mr. Grau most recently served as the Deputy Mission Director for the USAID Mission to Afghanistan. In that role, he led Mission’s staffing and program portfolios valued at $1.6 billion with 210 total staff. Mr. Grau’s main focus in Afghanistan was to help relocate and resettle 160 local staff and their families to start their new lives in the United States, to lead the design of USAID’s emergency assistance portfolio to help vulnerable Afghans with basic services, food security and livelihood programming.
Prior to joining USAID Afghanistan, Mr. Grau served as USAID’s Senior Development Advisor for the United States Central Command providing strategic advice and guidance on humanitarian, stabilization, and development policy in the Middle East and Central Asia regions. He ensured agency equities were incorporated into military plans and strategies and he grew and institutionalized USAID’s presence at the Combatant Command.
Before arriving at CENTCOM, Mr. Grau was assigned as USAID’s Country Representative to Djibouti. Along with his team, Mr. Grau helped reestablish USAID as a key partner to willing Government of Djibouti ministry partners, spearheading the co-design of flagship workforce development, basic education, and women’s economic empowerment programs. In Djibouti, Mr. Grau also worked with Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa to ensure military assistance alignment with Government of Djibouti development objectives and to leverage greater assistance support to Djibouti from U.S. military counterparts.
Mr. Grau started with USAID in 2001 as a Presidential Management Intern (now Presidential Management Fellow) and settling into the Development Credit Authority where he spent four years structuring financial transactions in Central and South America and in South and East Asia.
Mr. Grau joined the Foreign Service in 2005 and spent most of his career serving in Program/Project Design, Economic Growth, and Stabilization capacities in Barbados, Thailand, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. He started his career on the Hill as a member of Congressman Donald Payne’s office staffing the Congressional Black Caucus and subsequently moved into international financial consulting in the private sector. Mr. Grau also served in the Colombian Military Forces, deployed with the Multinational Force and Observers in the Sinai, Egypt.
Mr. Grau holds a master’s degree in public Affairs from the University of Maryland and a bachelor’s degree from New Mexico State University in International Relations and International Business. Mr. Grau speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese and has a working knowledge of Japanese and French. He is married to Stacy Grau.