Security begins with survival.
Dr. Alaa Murabit is a physician, peacebuilder and security & capital architect. Her work connects health, peacebuilding and finance around a question: who has the power and resources to shape their own future?
She founded Voice of Libyan Women at 21 during Libya’s revolution, created For Mama and conceived and co-created the Beginnings Fund. Her leadership spans the United Nations, the Gates Foundation and 500 Global.
Through RAIS, she builds security at source. RAIS brings governments, philanthropy, faith-aligned capital and the private sector together around what a country’s security rests on: children’s survival, girls’ futures, food and water, critical minerals, and capital that arrives before a crisis rather than after it. Its AI work helps middle powers, and the people who govern them, shape how the technology is built and governed. The aim is sovereign security: countries able to protect their people, make their own choices and sustain the institutions their futures depend on.
Official bio & byline for events & introductions
Dr. Alaa Murabit is a physician, peacebuilder and security & capital architect, and Founder & CEO of RAIS (Resilient Architecture for Integration & Security). Through RAIS, she builds security at source: the health, opportunity, trust and capital upstream of a nation’s security. Her work spans AI governance, sovereign security and development financing, connecting policy, capital and community leadership to shift power and confront poverty. She has mobilized over $40 billion across health, peacebuilding, and development. She created Voice of Libyan Women in 2011, created the first zakat-approved philanthropic collaborative dedicated exclusively to maternal and newborn health, For Mama, and conceived and co-created the Beginnings Fund, a collaborative philanthropic fund supporting government-led maternal and newborn health plans across Africa. Her leadership spans the Gates Foundation and 500 Global, alongside service as a UN SDG Advocate and UN High-Level Commissioner on Health, Employment and Economic Growth. She chairs Girls Not Brides. Her work was recognized by Human Rights Watch as a turning point in the global movement for women’s rights. Her honours include Canada’s Meritorious Service Cross, the 2026 WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award and TIME100.
What makes a life secure?
Dr. Murabit’s work returns to the relationship between security, power and capital: what societies protect, whose choices count, and how institutions turn resources into a future people can depend on.
Security at Source
What makes a country secure beyond its ability to defend itself? Dr. Murabit’s answer starts upstream, with what security rests on: health, opportunity, food and water systems, trusted institutions and the capital to sustain them. When the source is strong, a country holds sovereign security—the capacity to protect people, make meaningful choices and sustain essential institutions, with rights and accountability at its core.
The Permission Gap
A service can exist without a woman being free to use it. A seat can be offered without authority to act. The permission gap examines the distance between formal access and the power to exercise it.
Sacred Capital
Faith shapes how people give, whom they trust and what institutions can sustain. This work asks how philanthropy and faith-aligned finance can support shared public priorities while respecting rights and community agency.
Moral Velocity
Institutional delay has a human cost. Moral velocity asks how decisions and resources can move with an urgency proportionate to the lives and opportunities at stake—without sacrificing evidence or accountability.
Poverty and war should never be accepted as permanent conditions of human life. A serious account of security must confront both, while protecting people’s freedom to determine their futures.
Over four years
At government & institutional level
peacebuilding & development
Women, Peace & Security
Appointed her SDG Advocate
She is truly extraordinary, in every way.
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.
Peace is financed long before it is signed.
RAIS — Resilient Architecture for Integration & Security
RAIS builds security at source—the conditions upstream of a nation’s security. It connects country priorities with institutions and financing, bringing governments, philanthropy, faith-aligned capital and the private sector together around the foundations of sovereign security.
Our priorities sit in four areas, at different stages of development. Every one is country-led, and evidence runs through all of them.
People & potential
Health, education, livelihoods and agency: the human foundations a country’s future rests on.
- The Deciding DecadeFinancing adolescent futures as a sovereign security priority.
- Faith for Child Flourishing & FuturesThe world’s oldest institutions. Its youngest lives.
- Poverty & PowerThe resources to live. The authority to choose.
Resources & resilience
The food, water, minerals and essential systems a country must be able to rely on and govern.
- Food, Water & Agricultural SecurityThe essential systems a country must be able to rely on.
- Critical MineralsThe resources the future runs on, and the security they should build.
- Sovereign Resilience FundsFinancing the systems a country depends on.
Capital before crisis
Public, philanthropic, faith-aligned and private capital that arrives before the crisis, not after it.
- Innovative Finance & Capital Before CrisisNew ways to finance public priorities, including parametric zakat.
- Prevention & Peace FinancingInvest before violence becomes the organizing force of society.
AI & strategic power
Who builds, governs and uses the technology that will shape power for the next generation.
- AI & Middle PowersLeverage for the countries between the superpowers.
- AI for Decision MakersAI literacy for the people who govern.
- Equitable AIWho shapes the systems shaping the future?
Across every priority: country-led, evidence-driven, built to hand over.
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. Its Noor Campaign moved change through the language communities already trusted—the same insight that later powered For Mama.
For Mama
Dr. Murabit created For Mama, the first zakat-approved philanthropic collaborative dedicated exclusively to maternal and newborn health. Across the 2024–2026 Ramadan campaigns, more than 65 organizations have joined the coalition and report over $130 million raised collectively under the For Mama banner.
The Beginnings Fund
Conceived by Dr. Murabit, the Beginnings Fund brings philanthropic partners together around African governments’ maternal and newborn health priorities. Its 2030 targets include improving care for 34 million women and newborns and averting more than 300,000 deaths.
Co-Agency: Emerging Leaders Lab
Co-Agency supports emerging women’s leadership in security, health, peacebuilding and policy. Its work combines leadership labs, individual plans and connections with established institutions to strengthen women’s influence over resources and decisions.
Selected Honors
Among more than 100 honors and awards.
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.
“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.
During Libya’s revolution, she was studying medicine. 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 →
Speaking & strategic dialogues.
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.
Explore speaking & advisory →
Bring me the hard problem.
For conversations on philanthropy, security and institutional leadership, or invitations to write and speak—get in touch.
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