I build the things people usually remember to build once the crisis has already begun.
Security & capital architect.
Across peace, global health, trust capital, faith-aligned finance and security, I build the systems that let people—and countries—make more of their own decisions.
middle child
of eleven
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 raised as the middle child of eleven. Dinner required strategic planning. Debate was a contact sport. Privacy was largely theoretical.
My father believed education was the only inheritance worth leaving. My mother somehow kept thirteen people fed, functioning and mostly where they were meant to be.
Competing interests. Limited resources. Strong opinions. No possibility of anyone simply walking away.
A few things I learned before anyone gave me a title.
THE OPERATING SYSTEMThe ideas that still shape everything I build.
Local is not a delivery mechanism.
It is where trust lives—and where consequences arrive first.
Trust is not background scenery.
For billions of people, faith is one of the oldest operating systems for dignity, authority and obligation.
Capital is never neutral.
Who controls it controls the choices available to everyone else.
Medical school taught me how bodies fail. Libya taught me how institutions do.
I was learning a different version of home while navigating a dictatorship, medical school and the disorienting experience of finally belonging somewhere that could still make you feel like an outsider.
Then the revolution began. I was 21 and in my final year of medical school.
The women around me were treating the injured, moving supplies, documenting abuses and holding communities together under bombardment. They were doing nearly everything required to sustain the country—and were included in almost none of the conversations about what the country should become.
We built a women-led network across more than 35 Libyan cities and launched the Noor Campaign—bringing religious leaders, women, young people and local institutions together to challenge violence and women’s exclusion through the language communities already trusted.
People I am suspicious of.
- People who say “local leadership” but keep control of the budget.
- People who call women beneficiaries after women built the response.
- People who extract community knowledge, then hire someone elsewhere to interpret it.
- Strategies containing “empowerment” eleven times and no transfer of power.
- Meetings that could have been emails.
- Room-temperature tea.
- People who confuse hearing an idea with having had it.
I kept entering rooms where people like me were rarely expected to shape the outcome.
To help redraw the boundaries of what those rooms believed was possible.
I briefed the United Nations Security Council and supported policy work advancing women’s participation in peace and security. I helped shape the Sustainable Development Goals and argued that peace, justice and strong institutions were not an optional extra—but the conditions that allow everything else to hold.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed me as a Sustainable Development Goal Advocate. UN Secretary-General António Guterres reappointed me. I later served as a UN High-Level Commissioner on Health, Employment and Economic Growth.
Then I followed the money.
The generosity was never missing. The architecture was.
At the largest philanthropy in the world, I led a team responsible for a $250 million-a-year portfolio (yes, a year) across maternal and child survival, gender equality, health systems and fragile settings. I watched enormous amounts of capital move through global development, and saw how often it moved around the institutions people already trusted.
Faith communities already give vast amounts every year. Muslims—I happen to know, since I am one—give through zakat, sadaqah and Ramadan giving. The problem was not willingness. It was the absence of credible, scalable structures able to connect faith-aligned capital to maternal and newborn survival.
More than 50 organisations joined the model. Across three Ramadans, it mobilised approximately $130 million.
Different vehicles. Same question: what becomes possible when capital is designed to stay?
“Keeping people alive is not a cost. It is an investment in stability, labour, legitimacy and growth.”
RAIS.
Security begins before the emergency.
RAIS builds the financial, institutional and AI infrastructure countries need to finance resilience early—with capital already available to them, decisions held closer to consequence, and systems designed to stay.
Faith, traditional and community institutions treated as part of the operating system—not decorative outreach.
Vehicles built around capital already available, with terms participating institutions can actually sign.
Mandates, governance and regulation that survive the project cycle and ideally the next administration.
Models, triggers, evidence and data systems held by the institutions responsible for acting on them.
Capital follows trust.
Trust determines whether people use a clinic, accept a vaccine, participate in a peace process, pay into a system or believe an institution will still be there tomorrow.
Countries become fragile when the distance between the people making decisions and the people carrying their consequences becomes too wide.
One job was never really the plan.
Alongside RAIS, I lead Sustainable Growth at 500 Global, chair Girls Not Brides, am a Faith, Trust and Health Commissioner with the Lancet and Georgetown University, and serve as a trustee of Women for Women International.
A few things you should know.
I am a physician.
I still look at systems like a doctor: where is the actual failure, what is compensating for it, and what happens if we treat the symptom?
I am the middle child of eleven.
Conflict mediation began long before it appeared in my professional biography.
I have spent nearly two decades negotiating and building in conflict and fragile zones.
I can usually tell who actually holds the power before anyone has introduced themselves.
I have unsolicited opinions about Pride and Prejudice adaptations.
Every adaptation is an argument. I have notes.
I am Canadian and Libyan.
Neither is a footnote to the other.
I believe in practical infrastructure.
A good carry-on. A direct flight. A Kindle. A library card. Crocs. Sunglasses. Coffee. Lots of coffee.
I prefer ideas that survive reality.
A framework is only interesting if somebody can use it.
I write to understand what I think.
Unfortunately for everyone around me, I also speak to understand what I think.
I am in more conspiracy-theory group chats than any sensible person should admit.
Some I believe. On the rest, I remain alarmingly persuadable.
The rooms got bigger. The dynamics stayed exactly the same.
Middle of eleven. Everything I know about negotiation, I learned before I was ten.
My most demanding board has two members.
When I am not designing financing mechanisms or negotiating institutional architecture, 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.
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?
If not, it is probably not finished.
I write down what the room leaves out.
Frameworks, field notes and hard-won lessons from the work—free.
Read Shift Notes →For the people who need the titles.
Education
Leadership
Selected recognition
Bring me your money problems. Your strategy problems. Your implementation problems.
Especially the ones everyone has already had three meetings about—and that keep returning after the funding ends.
Start a conversation →