Physician · Founder · Security & Capital Architect · Libyan-Canadian
Security begins
with survival.
What if the first measure of security is not military strength, but whether people and communities can survive, sustain themselves, and shape their futures?
I build what does not yet exist: the systems that turn trust, local leadership, and community knowledge into security—backed by the capital and partnerships to scale and sustain them.
At 21, in my final year of medical school in Libya during the revolution, watching women hold communities together amid bombardment while being excluded from every room where the country's future was being designed. I created Voice of Libyan Women from that moment of contradiction: the people sustaining society through crisis were the very people excluded from shaping what came next.
That conviction has guided everything I have built since: from shaping UN Security Council processes and the architecture of the SDGs to designing new models for faith-aligned capital, maternal survival, and community resilience.
It is how I built Every Pregnancy (formerly For Mama) and The Beginnings Fund—new models that have helped mobilize more than $1B to save lives, strengthen systems, and build resilience at scale.
-
$40B+
MOVED TOWARD SURVIVAL, PROSPERITY AND PEACE
-
193
COUNTRIES IMPACTED
-
4
UN RESOLUTIONS SHAPED
-
9M+
TED TALK VIEWS
-
$1B+
DIRECTLY MANAGED
-
40+
COUNTRIES ADVISED AT HEAD OF STATE & EXECUTIVE LEVEL
The people closest to crisis are the architects of peace. That is the spine of everything I build.
RECOGNITION
Honors & Awards
-
![harvard radcliffe institute logo]()
Harvard Radcliffe Fellow
-
![The image shows the word 'PITOW!' written in bold black letters with an exclamation mark, all on a white background.]()
Nelson Mandela Changemaker
-
![Marisa Bellisario Foundation logo]()
Marisa Bellisario International Humanitarian Award Italy
-
![CNN logo.]()
CNN Leader
-
![The word 'WIRED' spelled with black letter tiles on a white background.]()
WIRED Global Thought Leader
-
![Aspen Institute logo]()
Aspen Spotlight Scholar
-
![The words "trust conference" in black, stylized text on a white background.]()
NYT TrustWomen Hero
-
![Governor of Canada logo]()
Meritorious Service Cross Canada
-
![Logo of the World Economic Forum featuring a stylized globe with interconnected lines.]()
WEF Young Global Leader
-
![Forbes 30 Under 30 logo in black and white.]()
Forbes 30 Under 30
-
![BBC Top 100 Women logo]()
BBC 100 Women
-
![The logo of the Government of Canada featuring a stylized maple leaf next to the text 'Government of Canada'.]()
100 Most Influential Women in History Canada
-
![MIT Media Lab Director's Fellows Program logo in gray text on a black background.]()
MIT Media Lab Director's Fellow
-
![Logo for the WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award]()
WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award
How Can I Help
Find What You Need
I
Explore the Work
From a peacebuilding movement built during revolution, to global policy frameworks, to faith-aligned capital systems—16 years of building the infrastructure that allows communities to survive and lead.
VIEW IMPACT PORTFOLIO →
II
Work Together
Advisory, strategic partnerships, media requests, and institutional collaborations across health, security, and development.
GET IN TOUCH →
III
Invite Alaa to Speak
On faith, power, capital, and the local leadership that's already building what everyone else is still waiting to fund. Represented by CAA.
VIEW TOPICS & REEL →
The Throughline
Security begins with survival. Survival depends on trust. Trust requires systems. Capital determines what scales.
Peace & Security · Local Legitimacy
I. The clearest vision comes from those closest to the consequences.
Founded at 21 during the revolution
I founded Voice of Libyan Women at 21, while in medical school and living through the Libyan revolution, building a movement across 35+ cities and launching the Noor Campaign.
The women holding communities together during bombardment have the clearest vision of what peace requires. I shaped four UN Security Council processes across 16 years of work on women, peace, and security. This body of work was recognized by Human Rights Watch as a turning point in the global movement for women's rights.
That same conviction led me to co-found the Omnis Institute and New Now, building platforms, mentorship pipelines, and leadership coalitions so the next generation of peacebuilders does not have to begin from zero.
Trust Networks · Security Infrastructure
II. Survival is the first act of security.
$600M+ collaborative · 34M mothers & babies · 300K+ lives
Health infrastructure is peace infrastructure. A mother in a fragile state doesn't die for lack of money — the money exists. Over a trillion dollars moves through Muslim giving every year. What was missing was the infrastructure to move it from intention to impact. I built it.
I created For Mama, the first zakat-certified collaborative for maternal and child health, which raised $38M in its first two Ramadans and now operates as the independent organization Every Pregnancy. That model demonstrated that faith-aligned capital could move beyond seasonal giving into a durable financing mechanism for survival.
That work informed The Beginnings Fund, a $600M+ collaborative reaching 34 million mothers and babies, and sat within a $1B+ portfolio I managed at the Gates Foundation across 21 strategies focused on health, development, and fragile settings. Earlier, I launched the Omnis Fund for women's health, displacement, and policy, and led Phase Minus 1 to build health and security capacity before crises hit.
WOMEN · POWER · Security
IV. The status of women is the earliest indicator of state fragility.
$130M+ faith-aligned capital mobilized in 3 Ramadans
Before institutions fail, economies collapse, or violence spreads, the conditions facing women often reveal where societies are becoming more fragile.
Women's safety, health, education, economic participation, and ability to make decisions are not separate from security; they are among the earliest and clearest indicators of whether communities can withstand crises and recover from them.
My work has focused on advancing evidence that women's agency strengthens resilience and on developing the Permission Gap: the invisible barriers that determine whether women can access the opportunities, resources, and decision-making power that shape their lives.
Investing in women is upstream of security and prosperity.
Trust Networks · Security Infrastructure
III. Trust is security infrastructure.
$130M+ faith-aligned capital mobilized in 3 Ramadans
Faith communities, diaspora networks, and local institutions already move resources, information, and legitimacy at extraordinary scale. The challenge has never been generosity. It has always been architecture. The networks people trust are already among the world's most important security infrastructures—we simply have not built the financial rails to support them.
For too long, these systems have been treated as informal, peripheral, or separate from security and development strategy. Yet in moments of crisis, they are often the first institutions people turn to: the networks that provide care, mobilize resources, maintain social cohesion, and sustain communities when formal systems are stretched or absent.
The strategic question is no longer whether trusted networks will shape resilience—they already do. It is whether we choose to invest in the financial infrastructure that allows them to operate at their full potential.
I build that bridge: translating trust into financial infrastructure by connecting faith-aligned capital with the institutions, partnerships, and investment vehicles that enable trusted local networks to finance health, resilience, and security at scale.
Global Architecture · Governance & Power · FINANCE
V. Governance is design.
Co-architect · 193 countries · Trillions aligned
Trillions in global capital move according to frameworks that someone, somewhere, designed. Governance is not abstract—it determines what gets funded, who gets included, and what the world measures as progress.
I've spent nearly two decades making sure those rooms include the people the frameworks will affect: co-architecting the Sustainable Development Goals with a focus on Goal 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions), and serving as UN High-Level Commissioner on Health, Employment, and Economic Growth.
That work reframed health workers as economic infrastructure (and the health workforce as one of the largest engines of women's employment and inclusive growth globally), shaping recommendations targeting 40 million new health sector jobs. I was appointed UN SDG Advocate by two successive Secretaries-General.
Because the rules that govern global finance were designed. We can redesign them.
Global GROWTH · Investment Architecture · Health, Security, Education & Poverty Elimination
VI. Capital follows design.
Created the Sustainable Growth platform at 500 Global
Security is shaped by where capital flows. Capital chases stability, which leaves the least stable economies starved of exactly what would stabilize them. Markets often underinvest in the places where resilience is most needed because the systems required to recognize and support it have not been built.
I created the Sustainable Growth platform at 500 Global to build investment architecture for markets traditional finance overlooks—aligning investors, governments, philanthropies, and entrepreneurs around opportunities that conventional risk models fail to see.
Stability is built by the conditions that allow people and societies to thrive.
FEATURED IN
IN THEIR WORDS
What Leaders Say
“
Read Shift Notes
Field notes from inside the work — on capital, power, what's coming, and how we stay human inside it. Join over 6,000 readers.