Osama Rashid
Osama Rashid is an architect and the founder of Cadini Group. Born in Iraq and based in Florence, he established Gruppo Cadini Srl in Italy in 1983, building the company from a practice focused on urbanism, architecture and engineering into one of the few Italian firms with sustained operational presence in high-risk international environments.
In 1997, recognising the scale of development need in post-conflict and fragile states, he expanded the group internationally, opening offices in Iraq, Jordan and Somalia. From these bases, Cadini Group began delivering a full range of services — architecture, engineering, infrastructure, procurement and project management — to clients operating in some of the most demanding conditions in the Middle East and East Africa.
Over four decades, Osama Rashid has built and maintained relationships with the United Nations, international NGOs, bilateral development agencies, government ministries and major international contractors. The group’s client list reflects the breadth of that network: UNAMI, UNSOS, the US Embassy in Baghdad, the Iraqi Ministry of Housing, the Iraqi Air Force, the Bank of Baghdad, KBR, PAE, AWI and Kenya’s KVDA, among others. This range — spanning UN peacekeeping logistics, sovereign government procurement and private sector infrastructure — is the result of consistent delivery under conditions that have deterred most international competitors.
What has distinguished the group across this period is not scale but reliability. Cadini Group developed deep knowledge of the labour requirements, institutional relationships and security dynamics of the regions it operates in, knowledge that clients have consistently valued above price or speed. That understanding, accumulated over decades and across multiple political transitions in Iraq and the Horn of Africa, is the group’s core asset.
Osama Rashid has been a consistent advocate for the role of private enterprise in sustainable development, aligning the group’s operations with the UN 2030 Agenda and engaging with the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation in its frameworks for private sector participation in partner countries. He serves as Executive Chairman of the group, overseeing its strategic direction, institutional relationships and long-term positioning across its current and pipeline projects.
