Laila coordinates IFC’s gender programs in Europe. She also leads IFC’s external dialogue in relation to the Update to the World Bank Group Gender Strategy.
Previously, Laila led IFC’s gender programs in Yemen, Libya and Egypt. She also supported IFC’s work on women’s employment in MENA. In MENA, she worked with clients to assist them in attracting and retaining more women in their workforce. She also led the implementation of the Egypt Women’s Employment Program aiming to Increase and/or improve the quality of women’s employment in the private sector in Egypt.
Laila has extensive experience in the area of promoting employment for women and gender diversity in the workforce from her work preceding her time at IFC. She has worked extensively for the GIZ where she was the Egypt Country Manager of GIZ’s “Economic Integration of Women in the MENA Region” Program. In her role, she advised individual companies in Egypt on how to improve their HR processes to be more diverse. She also trained partners and staff on Gender Diversity, coordinated workshops, trainings and conferences, managed women-to-women mentorship programs and ran a Gender Diversity management competition for companies in Egypt. Prior to her work with the GIZ, Laila worked at UNICEF Egypt, HarassMap the Population Council and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), where she was the Monitoring and Evaluation Officer for the organizations’ work with Egypt’s National Council for Women on combatting violence against women.
Laila holds a Master of Arts in Social Development from the University of Sussex and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and International Relations from the University of British Columbia (UBC).
