Security begins with survival.
Dr. Alaa Murabit builds the financial, institutional and trust infrastructure that lets people—and countries—make more of their own decisions. Usually before the emergency. Occasionally while everyone else is still scheduling the first meeting.
At 21, in her final year of medical school in Libya during the revolution, she watched women hold communities together amid bombardment while being excluded from every room where the country’s future was being designed. She created Voice of Libyan Women from that moment of contradiction—and its Noor Campaign moved change through the language communities already trusted: the same insight that later powered For Mama—and everything she has built since.
That conviction has guided everything since—from shaping UN Security Council processes and the architecture of the SDGs to placing the survival and flourishing of women, children and adolescent girls at the centre of how peace is financed.
As Global Director of Policy, Advocacy & Communications, Alaa directed a global team of 82 and budget of $1B USD over four years and brought women’s health to the forefront of the global health agenda. Alaa created For Mama, the world’s first zakat-approved Muslim collaborative dedicated exclusively to maternal and newborn health — a model that has grown to 65+ partner organizations and has mobilized more than $130M across three Ramadans. She also conceived The Beginnings Fund and secured its initial anchor funding of $300 million. Together, these models have mobilized more than $780 million for maternal and newborn health in three years.
At 500 Global she built the Sustainable Growth practice—blended finance for security, health and prosperity in frontier markets—including a first-of-its-kind global health financing partnership between Gavi, the GCC and 500 Global, and the Health Scale Up Facility. Her current work turns demonstration into standard: infrastructure countries can adopt to finance resilience before the crisis, not after. The sequence is deliberate: survival, trust, systems, scale.
“I have one mission: to build the financing, policy, and institutions that ensure mothers survive, children thrive, and women lead the peace.”
Nearly two decades of impact.
RAIS — Resilient Architecture for Integration & Security
Founded by Dr. Murabit, RAIS designs the financing, governance and trust architecture nations need to protect human life before conflict and crisis take hold. It joins the instruments of capital, the moral authority of faith and the institutions of the state, so that the people most exposed to instability become the people a nation’s peace is built around.
Faith for Child Flourishing
Faith for Child Flourishing brings faith institutions across traditions into shared commitment for young children: to speak for them, act for them and fund their survival. Its first Compact moves to ministerial signing in Manila, with a Child Flourishing Financing Facility to follow.
The Integrated Bet on Adolescent Girls
The Integrated Bet finances adolescent girls’ health, education, safety and economic power as a single investment, and places it where it belongs: at the centre of how nations secure their future.
Sovereign Resilience Funds
RAIS works with governments and sovereign capital to structure funds that place human resilience on a nation’s own balance sheet: health, food, water and the protection of children. Protecting people becomes national strategy, owned and governed at home.
Capital Before Crisis
RAIS is reimagining how the world pays for crisis. It designs pre-arranged, trigger-based and faith-aligned instruments, from parametric zakat to refugee sukuk, that move resources to communities at the first signal of shock and put decisions in the hands of the people closest to it.
“Alaa Murabit is a force for change and a global champion of women’s rights.”
“There are very few voices in the world like that of my sister, Alaa Murabit.”
“She has changed not just what is possible, but how we think about what is possible.”
Honors & Recognition
Built to outlast the builder.
Voice of Libyan Women
Dr. Murabit founded Voice of Libyan Women at 21 during the Libyan revolution—a movement across 35+ cities that made faith a tool for women’s rights rather than an argument against them.
For Mama
Dr. Murabit created For Mama, the world’s first zakat-approved Muslim collaborative dedicated exclusively to maternal and newborn health — a model that has grown to 65+ partner organizations and has mobilized more than $130M across three Ramadans.
The Beginnings Fund
Conceived by Dr. Murabit with $300 million in initial anchor funding—projected to save 300,000+ lives and built to reach 34 million mothers and babies.
“The people closest to crisis are the architects of peace. That is the spine of everything I build.”
Medical school taught her how bodies fail. Libya taught her how countries do.
She was in her final year of medical school during the Libyan revolution. Women were keeping families, neighbourhoods and basic services functioning through bombardment—and being excluded from the rooms designing what came next.
She has spent the years since closing that distance.
How it started →
Dr. Alaa Murabit is a physician, founder and security strategist. Over nearly two decades she has mobilized more than $40 billion in capital across 193 countries, shaped four UN Security Council processes, and helped architect the Sustainable Development Goals. At 21, during the Libyan revolution, she founded Voice of Libyan Women—a movement across 35+ cities that made faith a tool for women’s rights rather than an argument against them. She created For Mama, the world’s first zakat-approved Muslim collaborative dedicated exclusively to maternal and newborn health — a model that has grown to 65+ partner organizations and has mobilized more than $130M across three Ramadans. She also conceived The Beginnings Fund; together, these models have mobilized more than $780 million for maternal and newborn health in three years. Today, through RAIS, she is building the architecture nations need to finance peace before crisis: faith institutions committed to child survival, an integrated investment in adolescent girls, sovereign resilience funds, and humanitarian finance that arrives before the emergency. She serves as Board Chair of Girls Not Brides and Global Senior Advisor at 500 Global, where, as Managing Partner, she created the Sustainable Growth practice, including the Gavi, GCC and 500 Global Health Scale Up Facility. Her work was recognized by Human Rights Watch as a turning point in the global movement for women’s rights; her TED Talk has over 9 million views.
Speaking that moves hearts & minds.
Security begins with survival
Human development, health and resilience as national-security architecture.
Who gets to decide?
Sovereignty, institutional power, fragile states and the location of judgment.
Sacred capital
Faith, trust, Islamic social finance and new architectures for financing human survival.
From TED to the United Nations, boardrooms to universities, she translates complex systems into arguments people can remember—and decisions they can act on.
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“One of the leading global-health and inclusive-security experts of her generation.”
“Widening the frame around women’s health—treating it as central to economies, security and functioning societies.”
“Among the women leaders who challenge norms, lift other women and girls, and change the country for the better.”
The defining problems of our time will not be solved by the systems that created them.
If you are working on survival, trust, or the architecture of peace—and you are serious about building what does not yet exist—I want to hear from you.
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