I build the things people usually remember to build once the crisis has already begun.
I was raised in a family of eleven children, trained as a physician under a dictatorship, and entered public life during a revolution. Everything I have built since has come from the same observation: the people carrying the consequences are usually the last people permitted to make the decisions.
Who gets to decide?
The evidence.
The institutions.
The permission to act.
Eleven children. One dinner table.
I was born in Saskatoon to Libyan parents and grew up in a Muslim family, the middle child of eleven. There were thirteen of us at home. You learned to make your case, find an ally and work out when to give someone else a turn.
My father believed education was the only inheritance worth leaving. My mother kept thirteen people fed, functioning and mostly where they were meant to be.
Fortunately—and sometimes unfortunately for me—I learned a lot of what I know about power, alliance-building and diplomacy there. Long before I had a title for any of it.
Medical school taught me how bodies fail. Conflict taught me how institutions do.
I was learning a version of home while navigating a dictatorship, medical school, and the disorienting experience of finally belonging somewhere that could still make you feel foreign.
Then the revolution began. I was 21 and in my final year of medicine.
The women around me and I were treating the injured, moving supplies, documenting abuses and holding communities together under bombardment. We were doing nearly everything required to sustain the country and were included in almost none of the conversations about what it should become. The people closest to the cost had the clearest understanding of what peace would require, and the least power to shape it.
We built a movement.
We began by convening women, setting our own agenda and organising around one voice. We needed to enter the conversation together, with shared priorities, so we could not be excluded one by one.
We started by asking. A national security assessment across 8 Libyan cities, the first research of its kind in Libya, asking women what actually made them unsafe and what it cost them in public life.
The finding organised everything after it. The most common justification given for discrimination against women was not law, and it was not economics. It was the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islamic teaching.
So we tested the opposite of what international programming assumed. Rather than working around religion, we worked through it.
International Purple Hijab Day was the pilot: seminars and surveys in more than 25 cities, in schools, mosques and universities, built on one verse at a time taken exactly as written. In its first year 17,000 Libyans wore a purple scarf, ribbon or tie. The Prime Minister went on national television wearing one and said that domestic violence is un-Islamic, and that he supported legislative change. For the first time, domestic violence and its prohibition in Islam was being discussed in schools, universities, mosques, workplaces and on national media across the country.
The Noor Campaign.
“Exemplifies grassroots, religious-based activism for women’s rights.”
UN Global Study on Women, Peace & Security · 2015
View the source & campaign archive →Then we expanded the agenda. The Noor Campaign built on that national work to focus on inclusive security: connecting faith, rights, safety and participation in decisions about Libya’s future. The campaign used billboards in more than 20 cities, radio, television, seminars with local religious leaders, and #NoorLibya.
The decision that made it work was procedural rather than creative. We took every hadith and citation to Dar Al Ifta, the House of Fatwas, and had them authenticated. They verified the religious content and wrote to us in support of the campaign. After that, nobody could argue we had modified the faith to suit ourselves. We had not written anything. We had only changed who was delivering it.
The proof was in what opened. Before authentication, we could not get permission from the Ministry of Education to enter schools, or from the Ministry of Media to broadcast, even when we offered to pay. Afterwards, both.
That is the origin of everything I have built since. Faith is not an obstacle to development, and it is not a communications channel for it. It is the operating system most of the world already runs on, and it carries authority no external institution can manufacture or replace.
I took that argument to the United Nations Security Council. My policy work included engagement in four resolution processes on women, peace and security: 2122, 2242, 2467 and 2493. Read the policy record →
“Peace and equality are never gifts handed down from above. They are built slowly and stubbornly in community, most often by the women the world overlooks.”
The ideas that shape everything I build.
Local is not a delivery mechanism.
It is where trust lives, and where consequences arrive first.
Trust is infrastructure.
For billions of people, faith and community are among the oldest operating systems for dignity, authority and obligation. It is already load-bearing.
Capital is never neutral.
Whoever controls it controls the choices available to everyone else.
Peace strategies begin with the people who have to live with them.
Agreements are signed by a few. A durable peace strategy gives the people living with its consequences a role in shaping it, and something they cannot afford to lose.
Innovation is what makes a new choice possible.
A useful idea can stall because the rules, financing or evidence give nobody permission to act. Sometimes the innovation is a technology. Sometimes it is the structure that lets people use what already works.
The rooms got bigger. So did what we could change in them.
I brought the experience of women organising through conflict into the United Nations Security Council and the work of shaping global policy. My argument stayed the same: peace, justice and strong institutions are the conditions that allow health, education and opportunity to hold.
Secretary-General António Guterres reappointed me in 2019. The work was to turn a shared development agenda into political commitment, partnerships and decisions about resources.
Watch · World Economic Forum · 4 minHow to build lasting peaceFrom medical student in Libya to UN advisor on peace and security.
I shaped security strategies around people’s lives.
Security strategy for the stretch before a conflict starts.
Military planning begins at Phase Zero, the shaping stage before a conflict. Phase Minus 1 works on the stretch before even that: the years when health systems, local leadership and public trust either hold or begin to fail, and when strengthening them costs a fraction of any response.
As Executive Director I led its work on inclusive security alongside senior military and security leaders, advising governments, defence institutions and multilateral bodies. My case was simple: a security strategy that leaves out women, health and local leadership is missing most of its intelligence.
THE MOST influential leader on Inclusive Security I have ever known.
Lt. Gen. Daniel Leaf (ret.)Chair, Phase Minus 1
Backing the people closest to the problem.
I co-created the Omnis Institute, a non-profit built to back emerging local leaders: the people closest to a problem and furthest from the money. We worked with champions from Colombia to Bangladesh, investing in leaders who were already holding their communities together and giving them the platforms, networks and capital to be heard in national and global decisions.
Through Omnis I launched the Omnis Fund, my first health fund for women: a $10 million vehicle, built with a donor-advised fund, covering women’s health, displacement and policy. It was the first time I put trust and capital in the same structure.
The generosity was never missing. The architecture was.
Over four years at the Gates Foundation, as inaugural Director of Global Health Policy, Program Advocacy & Communications Strategy, I led a $1B+ portfolio across 21 health strategies and a global team of 50+. The work connected maternal and child survival, health equity, health systems and fragile settings. I built the Fragile, Conflict & Violence community of practice and created the Foundation’s first global women’s health advocacy strategy, helping connect the case for equitable care with investment decisions.
I kept returning to a question that had followed me from Libya: how could trusted institutions and the giving already happening within communities become a stronger source of support for mothers and babies? Many of those countries are living through conflict and fragility, where a mother’s survival depends on whether the health system and the community around her still hold. Reaching her is security work.
Noor had already taught me what it would take:
I developed the concept before joining the Gates Foundation and presented the financing model to the Foundation’s co-chairs in December 2022. I recruited the founding coalition, secured zakat eligibility, and structured the matching fund. The annual Ramadan campaign that first put the model to work launched as For Mama.
I led its first Ramadan fundraising campaign in 2024 and designed and financed the transition to independent leadership. Every Pregnancy now carries forward the annual Ramadan model I created.
It brought together two lessons I had carried from Libya: work through institutions people trust, and give the people doing the work greater access to resources.
How I built the For Mama financing model →The question was how to organise capital around the plans countries needed to deliver.
I conceived what became the Beginnings Fund in 2022 and then co-created it, including securing its initial three anchor partners. The question was how philanthropy could strengthen a public system that would remain after any individual grant.
The fund brings multi-year philanthropic financing behind African governments’ maternal and newborn health priorities. Different sources of capital, the same purpose: support the institutions people depend on. Explore the financing record & targets →
Same question, larger vehicles.
The same logic took me to 500 Global, where I became Founding Managing Partner, Sustainable Growth and created the Sustainable Growth Practice — blended finance for security, health and prosperity in frontier markets.
One of the first things I did there was bring three institutions together: Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; Grand Challenges Canada; and 500 Global. The result is the Gavi Innovation Scale-Up Facility, which aims to mobilise up to $300 million in private capital to scale immunisation innovations that countries have already piloted and want to roll out nationally.
A promising health innovation can stall between a pilot and a national system when financing for that middle stage is missing. The facility matches donors and investors to exactly that gap, with each partner absorbing a different layer of risk so capital can move faster into fragile and emerging markets.
All of it answers the question that has organised my work since Libya: who holds the money, and does the structure survive the people who started it?
“Sovereignty is not a flag. It is whether a country can pay for its own survival before a crisis, on its own terms.”
RAIS
Security begins with survival.
After working across peace strategies, global health philanthropy and private markets, I kept finding the same gap: people’s lives are connected, but the institutions and capital meant to serve them are divided.
I created RAIS to bring that experience into one institution. It advances sovereign security: the capacity of countries to protect their people, govern their own choices and sustain the institutions their futures depend on.
That means connecting policy, financing, advocacy and institutional design from the beginning. Health, education, livelihoods, food, water and safety are connected in people’s lives. They need to be connected in the decisions about their future.
AI brings me back to the same question of power. Who controls the infrastructure? Whose evidence informs a decision? What can a country negotiate, and what authority does it retain? My work on AI grows from those questions of security, capital and who gets to decide.
Evidence is part of that work. So are storytelling and advocacy: helping people understand what is at stake, building political commitment, and connecting a public priority to the institutions and investment that can carry it forward.
Every priority 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.
Explore RAIS and the work underway →Notes
I write about power, capital, faith and technology, and how the decisions we make now shape the lives we get to lead.
Read Shift Notes →A few things you should know.
I am a physician.
I still read systems like a doctor. Where is the actual failure, what is compensating for it, and what happens if we only treat the symptoms.
Nearly two decades in conflict and fragile settings.
I can usually tell who holds the power before anyone has introduced themselves.
I am Libyan and Canadian.
Neither is a footnote to the other.
I have unsolicited opinions about Pride and Prejudice adaptations.
Every adaptation is an argument. I have notes.
I believe in practical infrastructure.
A good carry-on. A direct flight. A Kindle. A library card. Crocs. Coffee, in quantity.
I prefer ideas that survive reality.
A framework is only interesting once somebody can use it.
I write to understand what I think.
Unfortunately for everyone nearby, I also speak to understand what I think.
I am part of the scissor generation.
I have ageing parents and young children. That keeps me thinking about what I owe the people who need me now, and what we are building for the people who come after us.
A few things I question.
- Long-term strategies with no long-term funding.
- Emergency funding that takes six months to access.
- Decisions about a country made without anyone from that country in the room.
- Security analysis that understands faith as a threat but overlooks its authority.
- Calling women beneficiaries after they built the response.
- Presenting someone else’s idea and work as your own.
- Room-temperature tea. I have questions for everyone involved.
My most demanding board has two members.
When I am not advising on security strategy or negotiating the terms of peace, I report to
They have no interest in my credentials. They do not respect calendar holds. They can detect an important call from several rooms away and respond by developing an urgent need that has never existed before.
They are also my most useful test of whether an idea is real. Does it make people safer? Does it give them more agency? Does it still work when nobody in the room is impressed by the language? Does it build a future I would actually want them to inherit?
Titles & biographies.
For event programmes, interviews and introductions.
Show titles, biographies & full recordHide titles, biographies & full record
Resilient Architecture for Integration & Security
Education, appointments, fellowships & institutional service.
Global appointments & commissions.
Commissioner · Lancet–Georgetown Commission on Faith, Trust & Health
The Commission examines how faith and trust affect health systems, public confidence and care. Its ongoing work brings community legitimacy into debates about how health institutions are designed, governed and trusted.
UN Sustainable Development Goal Advocate
Appointed by Secretaries-General Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres to build engagement, political commitment and partnerships around the 2030 Agenda. My work connected peace, equality and health as the SDGs reshaped the policy and financing priorities of 193 countries, giving governments, companies and investors a shared framework for sustainable development.
UN High-Level Commissioner · Health, Employment & Economic Growth
The Commission reframed health workers as an investment in care, decent work and inclusive economic growth. Its recommendations informed the joint WHO, ILO and OECD Working for Health action plan, adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2017—moving the agenda into a programme for national workforce planning, training and employment.
High-Level Advisory Group · UN Global Study on Resolution 1325
Advised the global review of participation, conflict prevention and protection under Resolution 1325. The study documented the Noor Campaign as a case of locally grounded change; its recommendations informed the wider reform agenda accompanying Resolution 2242, adopted unanimously in 2015.
UN Women · Global Civil Society Advisory Group
Joined as one of three youth representatives when UN Women expanded its Global Civil Society Advisory Group in 2014. The change brought younger civil society leaders into its global advisory structure, creating a direct channel for their experience and priorities in the institution’s work on equality and public participation.
UN Women appointment record →Boards & governance.
Fellowships & residencies.
Education & professional formation.
Created & Built
RAIS
Resilient Architecture for Integration & Security connects policy, capital, advocacy and AI governance to strengthen countries’ sovereignty, resilience and security.
Voice of Libyan Women
A movement connecting local leadership, faith and political advocacy to advance inclusive security and participation in decisions about Libya’s future.
For Mama → Every Pregnancy
The first zakat-approved philanthropic collaborative dedicated exclusively to maternal and newborn health, with $130M+ collectively reported across three Ramadan campaigns.
The Beginnings Fund
A government-aligned maternal and newborn health fund within a nearly $600M joint commitment, targeting 34 million women and newborns by 2030.
500 Global Sustainable Growth Practice
An investment practice connecting private markets, public priorities and blended finance to expand opportunities in health, climate and underserved emerging economies.
Omnis Institute
An independent institute backing emerging local leaders, with work spanning health, displacement and policy, including a $10 million health fund.
The NewNow
A collective of emerging global leaders, modeled on The Elders, bringing shared influence and action to interconnected social and environmental challenges.
Co-Agency: The Emerging Leaders Lab
A leadership lab supporting emerging leaders in security, health and peace strategies through mentorship, institutional connections and greater influence over decisions.
Peace is built long before it is negotiated.
If you are building something that has to outlast you, that is the conversation I want.
Start a conversation →