World Humanitarian Day falls this Wednesday, held each year in recognition of the people who deliver relief and development work in the hardest and most dangerous places on earth, and of those who have lost their lives doing it. Dr. Alaa Murabit has spent fifteen years working on how that assistance is funded and delivered. A Libyan-Canadian physician who trained in medicine at the University of Zawia and took a master's at LSE, she has built financing, policy and institutions that keep mothers and children alive in fragile settings. On the pace of that progress, she has said:
Alaa Murabit: "Our journey will be long, but if we remain ambitious, deliberate and strategic, we will make strides in the right direction."
Fifteen Years of Ambition
Murabit was twenty-one and a medical student when the Libyan revolution began. She founded Voice of Libyan Women that year, and it grew into a coalition spanning more than thirty-five cities, bringing together community and faith leaders around women's rights and security. The conviction she took from it has shaped everything since, that coalitions rooted in communities hold together where solutions imposed from outside fall apart. She carried the same principle into her work at the Gates Foundation, where she saw how little of the trillion dollars moving through zakat and other Islamic giving each year was reaching mothers and babies in the places they are most likely to die. So she built the first zakat-certified collaborative for maternal and newborn health, bringing together Muslim organisations that had never worked with one another before.
Long Road, Same Destination
Ambition is easy to sustain for a year. Fifteen is another matter, particularly in work where results arrive slowly and setbacks are public. Murabit's quote holds both of those truths at once, admitting the road is long while keeping her expectations of where it ends exactly where they were. This year World Humanitarian Day makes a similar case, calling for moral imagination and moral ambition at a moment when the need has rarely been greater and the pressure to scale back is mounting. Murabit has spent fifteen years proving that ambition of that kind can survive the long road.
Values in Focus
Murabit's message speaks to the Laidlaw value of being #Ambitious and the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Humanity. Ambition, in her account, means setting your sights on outcomes that will take decades and refusing to shrink them to fit the time you have. Humanity is what gives that ambition its direction, compassion turned into architecture, so that care for people becomes systems and funding that outlast any one person's involvement.
A Call to Reflect
As you consider Alaa Murabit's words, we invite you to reflect and share in the comments: what is the long journey you are on, and what would it take to walk it more deliberately?