Three people who ran out of patience with the official version
The Sector Debrief is a conversation between three people who have spent a long time inside humanitarian and development work. No polished lines. No scripted answers. The conversations that happen when the microphones are off.
Ali Al Mokdad
Co-Host
Senior Strategic Leader in Global Impact Operations, Governance Reform, and Humanitarian Diplomacy. Author of Quantum Humanitarian. Held multiple senior leadership roles in country operations across some of the hardest displacement contexts of the last decade, moving between field offices and headquarters. Writes openly about the operational pressure most leaders feel but rarely say out loud, and about the distance between what the sector announces and what it actually does.
Systems thinker connecting strategy and implementation. Based at Humentum in Washington, working on operational change in international development. Spends her time in the messy middle of organisational change. Interested in the difference between strategy on paper and strategy that actually moves a building. Cares about what equitable, locally-led work looks like once the slides are turned off and someone has to choose. A practitioner who keeps asking who the system is currently designed for.
Independent leadership coach for the humanitarian sector. Former senior operational lead across multiple international NGOs. Eighteen years of senior leadership across some of the most demanding humanitarian environments on earth. Now coaches the people who carry that kind of weight. Brings a calm, irreverent, and structural read on what leadership under pressure actually costs, and what it can still do when most of the certainty has left the room.
Spent three decades at CARE International, latterly as its Secretary General, and makes the case for locally led development as a practice rather than a term. On the show she argued that idealism is not naivety, and that authenticity and institutional survival are not the opposites the sector often assumes.
Works across international development between the Gambia and Denmark, and treats identity and positionality as practical questions rather than abstract ones. On the show she unpacked code switching, ancestral responsibility, and the difference between rushing to fix something and staying curious enough to solve it.
Works on integrity, risk and compliance across the third sector, having spent years in humanitarian and development roles before that. On the show she argued that risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives, which makes it opportunity as much as threat, and pressed for risk sharing instead of pushing risk down to the least resourced partner.
Leads the Impact Alliance, the collaboration between CARE, Mercy Corps, and Save the Children, after fifteen years at Save the Children in global and technical leadership roles, most recently as Director of Regional and Multi-Country Programmes, with earlier food security and livelihoods work for CARE in the Sahel. On the show she was honest about how much harder collaboration is than the slogans suggest, and described an alliance that is practising its way into the future of INGOs rather than theorising about it.
