Physician & CEO, RAIS
Dr. Alaa Murabit is a physician who builds the financial and policy architecture for global security and resilience, working across governments, the private sector, and multilateral partners. At 21, during Libya’s revolution, she founded Voice of Libyan Women as a final-year medical student – running workshops in mosques, training women to participate in the political transition, and authoring the Noor Campaign, which used Qur’anic scholarship to challenge gender-based violence and reached over fifty countries. She went on to co-architect the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the framework now shaping how countries, including Canada, measure progress on equity and development, and has mobilized more than $40 billion over her career toward health, gender, and development outcomes.
As a Director at the Gates Foundation, she directed $1 billion over four years across policy, advocacy, resource mobilization, and communications spanning more than 20 health issues, including climate and health. There, she created For Mama (now Every Pregnancy), the first zakat-approved maternal health collaborative, built through a coalition of imams, mosque networks, diaspora communities, and women’s organizations across three continents; it has since raised more than $130 million and is used by over fifty organizations globally. She also conceived The Beginnings Fund, a $600 million collaborative now operating across ten African countries. As Managing Partner at 500 Global, she created the firm’s Sustainable Growth practice and now serves as its Senior Advisor.
As Board Chair of Girls Not Brides, she leads a global partnership of more than 1,400 civil society organizations working to end child marriage, and her broader policy work – including as a UN High-Level Commissioner on Health, Employment and Economic Growth and a member of the Lancet-Georgetown Commission on Faith, Trust and Health – has helped reshape how governments invest in the female workforce and how the global health field engages with faith. Her honors include a spot on the TIME100, Canada’s Meritorious Service Cross, and the 2026 Gothenburg Sustainability Award.
