Fabrizio Poretti holds a multidisciplinary Master’s degree from the University of Berne in cultural anthropology, Islamic sciences and geography.
He is fluent in Switzerland’s four official languages and can communicate in Portuguese, Modern Standard Arabic, Esperanto, Spanish and English.
Mr Poretti joined the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs in 1999 for his first assignment abroad as Community Relations Officer and Human Rights Observer in Palestine. He returned to Switzerland in 2001, where he worked as a researcher for the Federal Department of Health on a project to study the perception of influenza and its prevention through vaccination. In 2002, he was a member of the SWISSCOY staff as ‘Liaison Officer’ during the peace mission in Kosovo.
Two years later, in 2004, he was selected by the Federal Federal Department of Foreign Affairs to take up the post of ‘Head of Reintegration and Operations for Internationally Displaced Persons (IDPs)’ in Afghanistan. Mr Poretti then worked for the United Nations Development Programme in Yemen in 2005 as ‘Chief Technical Adviser for the Disaster Management Programme’.
In 2006, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation appointed him as Disaster Risk Reduction Coordinator at the Swiss Embassy in Iran, with a particular focus on Swiss reconstruction projects following the BAM earthquake.
As Head of the Swiss Cooperation Office in Morocco in 2008, he was in charge of a programme that included migration, economic development and disaster risk reduction.
From 2012 to 2016, Mr Poretti was Head of Swiss Humanitarian Aid for Central America. In 2016, he was assigned as Head of Cooperation at the Swiss Embassy’s Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in Colombia in a post-conflict peace-building context. Mr Poretti was Deputy Head of Mission and Deputy Head of International Cooperation at the Swiss Embassy in Haiti from July 2020 to July 2023.
In August 2023, he joined the Swiss Embassy in Tunisia as Head of International Cooperation.