Mr Gilles Klein is the Honorary Secretary General of the Alliance. The Chairman of the Restructuring Board of the Alliance and an Executive Advisor of the Agency. 

 

His mission is to support the Agency in the completion of the restructuring of the Alliance until its first General Assembly which will be held on November 28-29, 2023 in Dubai. He provides his expertise and support for the development and implementation of the strategies that have been defined with the Agency and has full power and authority to execute its mandate.

 

Mr Klein was appointed Secretary General of the Alliance in January 2008. His appointment followed the Rabat seminar, a precursor to the creation of the Alliance as an Intergovernmental Organization in 2007. Together with his wife Mrs. Sylvie Delpech, they founded the General Secretariat of the Alliance, developed and edited the Sport-MDGs and then "Sport for Development and Peace" programs for the SDGs - 2030. They helped develop the organization by obtaining the membership of twenty-two Member States. For more than ten years, Mr Klein was the political authority of the Alliance where he conducted its foreign policy and its parliamentary, field, bilateral, preventive and crisis diplomacies.

Mr Klein retired as Secretary General of the Alliance in 2018. Since then he has the status of Honorary Secretary General, of which he retains the title emeritus. Following his retirement, Mr Klein became a special advisor and General Manager for Winstant Limited, a digital finance company based in Hong Kong.

 

A wide experience of sports and expertise in governmental, national and international organizations, had led Mr Klein to this function. He was the President of the French youth sports programs, evaluator of the European Year of Education through Sport and, adviser for the promotion of projects at the European Commission. He was also the President of the physical education committee of the European Network of Sports Science, Education and Employment.

 

He acquired his knowledge of physical education and sport through a curriculum in sports sciences from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1968, a doctorate in sociology of sports policies in 1992, and by passing the competitive examination of aggregation receiving the valedictorian title in 1986.

Senior lecturer at the University of Toulouse and associate professor in several European universities, he taught for seventeen years. As a researcher, he has published hundreds of articles and a dozen books. He co-created the European master's degree in physical education and school sport within the European Network of Sports Science, Education and Employment. He chaired the "Physical Education and Sport" publishing house in INSEP - Paris, the fulcrum of the "Sport-MDGs" programs with UN Agencies. His in-depth knowledge of the field comes from more than thirty years of teaching physical education and sports to young people. 

 

G. Klein is a French citizen who has always been passionate with development issues. As a teenager, he understood that the Bandung conference and the process of decolonization that followed, symbolized the entry on the international scene of “Third World” countries, sealing his commitment to non-alignment, then to sustainable development. The Alliance working for the promotion of youth through sport and the employment of young people in developing and emerging countries was only an opportunity to coordinate his professional passion and his commitment as a citizen of the world.