Career Journey Across the United Nations and Public Sector

I started with hospital data. In 2005 I ran data management at Aga Khan University Hospital in Islamabad, where the job was simple to describe and hard to do: make sure the numbers that doctors and administrators acted on were right. That job taught me the lesson that has carried through every role since. Data is not an IT function. Someone acts on it, and the action lands on a person.

From the hospital I moved into development work as Chief Technology Officer for CIDA in Pakistan, spending six years building the digital infrastructure behind development programmes. In 2012, disaster response pulled me into humanitarian operations with UNOCHA in Islamabad. A year later I was in Juba with UNICEF, managing information systems in the middle of the South Sudan emergency. Emergencies strip away everything optional. When the network is down and the situation changes hourly, you learn exactly which parts of a data system matter and which parts were decoration.

UNICEF Kenya followed, then UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, where I worked on global data strategy and standards for field operations. Geneva showed me the other side of the problem: you can write a perfect global standard and watch it fail in the field, because the field has constraints the standard never met.

The years that defined my work came next. From 2018 to 2024 I led the Data Analysis Group at UNHCR Jordan. Jordan hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world, and every gap in our systems translated directly into a person waiting longer for help. We ran a $2.5 million digital transformation programme that cut registration service time by 83 percent. We built UNHCR's first global IVR appointment system — a voice service, because a phone call reaches people an app never will — and more than 700,000 refugees used it. Our data integrity analysis recovered 63,000 missing contacts, each one a family that services could reach again. We built DigitalAAP, an AI-driven feedback platform that was selected for the UN Global Pulse Accelerator, and the solutions were replicated in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Ethiopia.

That is where Last-Mile AI comes from. Not from a whiteboard — from watching systems succeed or fail at the exact point where they meet a person with a basic phone, a language most models barely cover, and no reason to trust an institution's technology.

Since 2024 I have been Head of Data and Digital Solutions at UNESCWA in Beirut, leading AI, LLM, and digital transformation work for economic and social development across the Arab region. The scale has changed: not one camp or one country, but how institutions across a region adopt AI with governance that holds. The lesson has not changed since the hospital in Islamabad: build for the person at the end of the system, and prove it worked with numbers you can defend.