IESC Announces Tarek Nabhan International Achievement Award Winner, Santiago Colato

Established in 2013, the Tarek Nabhan International Achievement Award recognizes staff members in our overseas offices who regularly go above and beyond their normal job responsibilities to achieve excellence. The award is named after Tarek Nabhan in recognition of his 31 years of service to IESC. For 2025, we honored our winner Santiago Colato, who serves as the ICT Business Specialist for IESC’s activities in El Salvador.

As a business analyst with a master’s degree in Business Intelligence and Big Data, he has brought exceptional technical depth to the team in El Salvador, playing a key role in the program’s digital transformation work, since joining the team in 2023.

Mr. Colato demonstrates outstanding professionalism, technical leadership, and consistent ability to deliver high-impact results in complex environments. He led the integration of phytosanitary procedures, like e-Phyto and pre-certification functions, into a single window housed within the Central Bank of El Salvador. This shift helped move agricultural trade processing into a more modern, transparent, and streamlined digital environment. He also led the procurement and implementation of IT services connecting the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock’s Agricultural Health Information System with the Secretariat for Economic Integration of Central America’s (SIECA’s) regional sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) platform, strengthening the foundations for more efficient SPS management and regional trade integration. Mr. Colato has navigated frequent changes in government counterparts and complex institutional dynamics with professionalism and consistency, ensuring continuity and progress towards program goals.

Beyond his work in El Salvador, Mr. Colato proactively shares experiences, lessons learned, and practical knowledge with ICT specialists in IESC’s Guatemala and Honduras offices, promoting consistency and allowing solutions tested in one context to inform progress in another country context. He has even facilitated connections between El Salvador and other countries, including Chile, to support system interoperability and knowledge exchange while also strengthening regional collaboration and learning. He contributes to quality assurance across IESC’s activities in El Salvador and for different country contexts by reviewing proposals to ensure clarity of deliverables, realistic timelines, and overall process quality. This work extends beyond his core technical role and reflects his broader value to the team.

Mr. Colato delivers innovative and practical solutions to technical problems, but also a keen ability to understand how processes, institutions, and implementation challenges connect in practice. His leadership and exceptional service have strengthened IESC’s work, elevated our partnerships, and delivered measurable impact for participants in El Salvador. His professionalism and ability to create lasting results exemplify the sustained excellence this award was designed to recognize. He doesn’t just fulfill the responsibilities of his position with distinction, but he demonstrates initiative, a collaborative spirit, and genuine commitment to IESC’s mission.