In the sprawling refugee camps of Palestine, among the voices of youth and marginalized women, a young media and sociology professional began to see patterns that others missed. Mira Abu Moghli’s journey into humanitarian protection did not begin with policy documents or academic frameworks. It began with a single, uncomfortable realization: exclusion is not an accident. It is manufactured through systems, policies, and deeply embedded social norms.
“Working closely with youth, women, and marginalized communities made it clear to me that exclusion is not accidental, it is produced through policies, norms, and institutional practices,” Mira reflects. This understanding became the foundation of a 17-year career that has transformed how organizations approach Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) and child protection across three continents.
Today, Mira stands among the most influential voices reshaping humanitarian responses in the MENA region and beyond. Her work spans the critical intersection of gender, disability, displacement, and child protection, territories where human dignity meets systemic inequality. But her path to this position of influence was shaped by moments that many would find overwhelming, experiences that instead deepened her resolve to dismantle the structures that perpetuate vulnerability.
THE EDUCATION OF EMPATHY: WHEN ACADEMIC THEORY MEETS LIVED REALITY
Mira’s transition from media and sociology into Gender and Development studies was not merely an academic pivot. It represented a conscious choice to equip herself with the analytical tools needed to understand power structures and institutional failures. Her multidisciplinary background became her greatest asset, allowing her to move fluidly between structural analysis and practical programming.
“Gender and Development grounded me in power analysis and rights-based frameworks, while media and sociology sharpened my understanding of narratives, social norms, and collective behavior,” she explains. This intellectual foundation informs everything from how she designs research to how she communicates findings to diverse audiences.
But it was her role as Disability Program Officer at UNRWA that truly crystallized her understanding of how vulnerabilities compound and intersect. Managing community-based rehabilitation centers in refugee camps, Mira witnessed firsthand how disability, gender, poverty, and displacement create layers of exclusion that traditional humanitarian responses often fail to address.
“Exclusion compounds across disability, gender, poverty, and displacement,” she notes, describing how a displaced girl with a disability faces simultaneous barriers to education, heightened exposure to violence, and systematic economic exclusion. This was not theoretical knowledge gleaned from textbooks. These were real people, real stories, real consequences of fragmented humanitarian responses.
DEFINING MOMENTS: WHEN SEEING BECOMES DOING
The crucible moments that define a career are rarely comfortable. For Mira, leading gender and disability analyses in North West Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan brought her face to face with issues many prefer to ignore: child labor, early marriage, and the systematic erosion of childhood in crisis contexts.
“These moments solidified my commitment to intersectional approaches that address root causes, not just symptoms,” Mira states with quiet conviction. The work revealed something troubling yet essential: most humanitarian interventions treat symptoms while leaving underlying power structures intact. A girl married at 14 is not suffering from a lack of awareness campaigns. She is caught in economic desperation, social norms, and institutional failures that converge to eliminate her choices.
This realization fundamentally shaped Mira’s approach. She began asking different questions. Not “How do we respond to child marriage?” but “What systems produce child marriage, and how do we transform them?” Not “How do we serve vulnerable populations?” but “How do we dismantle the structures that create vulnerability in the first place?”
Her work on child marriage prevention with Terre des Hommes exemplifies this systems-thinking approach. By combining community dialogue, case management guidance, and policy advocacy, the initiative achieved something rare in humanitarian work: it changed not just individual outcomes but institutional practices. Referral pathways improved. Program designs evolved. Organizational strategies shifted to reflect the complex, intersectional nature of protection risks.
THE POWER OF PLACE: WHY CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING
Eighteen years across MENA, Europe, and Asia taught Mira a lesson that many international organizations still struggle to internalize: inclusion cannot be exported as a template. Each context demands its own approach, rooted in local realities and responsive to specific power dynamics.
“In MENA, protection work is deeply shaped by displacement, protracted crises, and social norms around gender and age,” Mira observes. “In Europe, institutional accountability and systems strengthening are more central. In fragile contexts, trust-building and community legitimacy are paramount.”
These are not merely geographic variations. They represent fundamentally different ecosystems of risk, protection, and power. What works in Amman may fail in Aleppo. A strategy effective in Brussels may be culturally inappropriate in Beirut. This contextual intelligence, the ability to understand power, culture, and political economy while remaining anchored in universal human rights principles, has become Mira’s signature strength.
Her partnerships with grassroots organizations across Jordan and the West Bank demonstrate this principle in action. These organizations bring something that international agencies often lack: legitimacy, deep contextual insight, and long-term presence in communities. They understand informal power structures and social dynamics that external actors routinely miss.
“Partnering with them strengthens early identification of risks, improves referral pathways, and ensures interventions are culturally appropriate,” Mira explains. But there is something more fundamental at work. “These partnerships also shift power by recognizing local actors as co-creators, not implementers.”
This reframing matters. It transforms the relationship from patronage to partnership, from extraction to collaboration. Communities are not passive recipients of aid but knowledge holders whose participation is essential for sustainable impact.
COMMUNITY AS CO-CREATOR: WHY LOCAL OWNERSHIP DETERMINES SUCCESS
Ask Mira why community engagement is central to her work, and her answer cuts through the typical development sector rhetoric about participation and ownership.
“Because interventions that ignore lived realities rarely last,” she states plainly. “Communities are not passive beneficiaries; they are knowledge holders.”
This is not a theoretical position. From household dialogue models to child protection research, Mira has witnessed repeatedly that when communities shape solutions, resistance decreases and protective behaviors increase. The logic is straightforward: people support what they help create. They trust what emerges from their own analysis of problems and opportunities.
Yet most humanitarian responses still operate on an export model. Solutions designed in capital cities or headquarters are delivered to communities expected to implement them faithfully. When these interventions fail to take root, organizations blame “beneficiary resistance” or “cultural barriers” rather than acknowledging the fundamental flaw: solutions imposed rarely succeed.
Mira’s approach inverts this model. She begins with community knowledge, understanding local power dynamics, social norms, and existing protective mechanisms. External expertise and resources are then deployed to strengthen what already exists rather than replace it with imported models.
THE INTERSECTIONALITY IMPERATIVE: WHY SINGLE-ISSUE RESPONSES FAIL
If there is a conceptual thread running through all of Mira’s work, it is intersectionality. Not as academic jargon but as practical necessity. In humanitarian crises, vulnerabilities rarely operate in isolation.
“For example, a girl with a disability faces layered risks: limited access to education, higher exposure to violence, and economic exclusion,” Mira illustrates. “My work consistently shows that vulnerability is produced at intersections, which is why disaggregated data, intersectional analysis, and tailored responses are essential.”
This understanding has profound implications for program design. A child protection intervention that ignores gender dynamics will miss critical risks. A disability inclusion program that does not account for displacement will fail to reach those most in need. A gender equality initiative that overlooks economic factors will struggle to create sustainable change.
The integration extends to less obvious connections. As a focal point for protection, disability inclusion, and Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS), Mira has seen how these areas complement and reinforce each other in crisis settings.
“Protection risks often manifest through psychological distress, while unaddressed mental health needs can increase vulnerability to violence and exploitation,” she explains. “Disability inclusion ensures responses do not unintentionally exclude those most at risk.”
This holistic perspective is particularly crucial when addressing Mental Health and Psychosocial Support for women, children, and persons with disabilities during displacement. MHPSS functions as both prevention and protection, strengthening coping mechanisms, restoring agency, and supporting positive family and community dynamics.
“In displacement contexts, psychosocial support can reduce harmful coping strategies, improve help-seeking behaviors, and enhance the effectiveness of child protection and GBV interventions,” Mira notes. It is not a standalone service but an integral component of comprehensive protection systems.
AUDITING FOR TRANSFORMATION: MOVING BEYOND COMPLIANCE
As a certified Gender Auditor, Mira has seen inside numerous organizations attempting to mainstream GESI across their programs. What she has found is both predictable and frustrating.
“The most common gap is treating GESI as a compliance requirement rather than a transformative process,” she observes. Organizations focus on updating policy language, creating gender strategies, and establishing inclusion targets. But actual practices, decision-making processes, budgets, and accountability mechanisms remain unchanged.
“Another gap is insufficient investment in staff capacity and organizational culture, which undermines even well-designed strategies,” Mira adds. A gender policy is meaningless if staff lack the skills or institutional support to implement it. An inclusion commitment rings hollow when budgets do not reflect stated priorities.
So how do humanitarian and development actors move beyond performative commitments to achieve meaningful, measurable inclusion? Mira’s answer is refreshingly concrete.
“By linking commitments to incentives, budgets, and performance systems,” she explains. “Inclusion becomes real when leadership is accountable, data is used for decision-making, and communities are part of monitoring and feedback.”
Practical tools make this possible: gender-responsive budgeting that allocates resources according to stated priorities, inclusive Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) frameworks that track differential impacts across identity groups, and participatory audits that give communities a voice in assessing program effectiveness.
These are not revolutionary concepts. They are basic management practices applied with intentionality to inclusion outcomes. Yet their implementation remains frustratingly rare across the humanitarian sector.
PREVENTING VIOLENCE: STRATEGIES THAT ACTUALLY WORK
Gender-based violence and child protection represent two of the most critical and persistent challenges in humanitarian contexts. Mira’s 18 years of experience have taught her that simplistic, single-intervention approaches inevitably fall short.
“Multi-layered strategies work best, combining social norm change, economic empowerment, safe services, and institutional accountability,” she states. Prevention requires engaging men and boys as allies, addressing the economic stressors that fuel violence, and strengthening community protection mechanisms. Response requires survivor-centered systems that prioritize dignity, safety, and agency.
But none of these elements work in isolation. Economic empowerment without addressing social norms may increase risks for women challenging traditional roles. Awareness campaigns without safe services leave survivors with knowledge but no support. Community-based protection without institutional accountability creates informal systems that may reinforce existing power imbalances.
The integration of these elements requires sophisticated coordination across sectors and actors. It demands that humanitarian organizations move beyond their traditional silos to create comprehensive protection ecosystems. And it necessitates the kind of long-term investment that short-term humanitarian funding cycles often cannot accommodate.
ENGAGING POWER: HOW TO MAKE POLICYMAKERS CARE
Technical expertise and grassroots legitimacy mean little if they cannot influence the institutions and policymakers who control resources and set priorities. Mira has developed a sophisticated approach to engaging these actors, one that balances evidence with political realities.
“By translating evidence into actionable policy options and aligning recommendations with national priorities,” she explains. “I prioritize co-creation, technical dialogue, and demonstrating how inclusion strengthens overall system effectiveness.”
This approach recognizes that policymakers respond to different incentives than program implementers. Framing protection purely as a rights issue may resonate morally but often fails politically. Demonstrating how inclusive systems benefit entire populations, strengthen economic productivity, and enhance social stability creates more traction.
“Building trust and framing protection as a development and governance issue, not only a social one, has been particularly effective,” Mira notes. This strategic repositioning does not compromise on rights. It expands the coalition of actors who see inclusion as aligned with their interests and priorities.
The approach has proven successful in influencing policy across multiple contexts, from national child protection strategies to institutional reforms in international organizations. By meeting policymakers where they are while maintaining clear ethical commitments, Mira has demonstrated that principled advocacy and political effectiveness need not be contradictory.
PROTRACTED DISPLACEMENT: LESSONS FOR GLOBAL DECISION-MAKERS
Much of Mira’s recent research and policy work focuses on mass displacement, particularly protracted displacement situations where people spend years or decades in exile. The MENA region offers stark lessons for global decision-makers confronting similar challenges from Ukraine to Myanmar.
“Protracted displacement requires development-humanitarian-peace coherence,” Mira emphasizes. “Short-term responses are insufficient.” Emergency aid can save lives in acute crises, but when displacement extends for years, different approaches become necessary.
“Investing in inclusive systems like education, labor markets, and social protection benefits both displaced and host communities and reduces long-term protection risks,” she explains. This shift from temporary assistance to systems strengthening requires fundamentally different funding mechanisms, coordination structures, and political commitments.
It also requires confronting uncomfortable truths about the political economy of protracted displacement. Refugee camps and temporary settlements often become semi-permanent cities, yet are governed through exceptional frameworks that deny residents basic rights and opportunities. This legal and political limbo creates perfect conditions for protection risks to flourish.
Mira’s work advocates for responses that acknowledge this reality and invest in sustainable solutions: access to formal labor markets rather than informal work, integration into national education systems rather than parallel structures, and inclusion in social protection schemes rather than perpetual aid dependence.
These recommendations challenge both humanitarian and development orthodoxies. They require host governments to extend rights and services to displaced populations, often politically contentious. They demand that donors commit to multi-year funding cycles when annual budgets are the norm. And they necessitate that humanitarian agencies embrace systems strengthening even when their organizational cultures prioritize direct service delivery.
CLIMATE AND PROTECTION: THE EMERGING CRISIS MULTIPLIER
As climate change accelerates, Mira observes its increasingly profound influence on protection risks, particularly for women, children, and persons with disabilities. The connections are both direct and indirect, operating through multiple pathways that compound existing vulnerabilities.
“Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities by increasing displacement, resource scarcity, and livelihood loss,” Mira explains. “Women, children, and persons with disabilities often face heightened risks due to limited mobility, care burdens, and exclusion from decision-making.”
When drought destroys agricultural livelihoods, families adopt desperate coping strategies. Child labor increases. Early marriage accelerates as families seek to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Competition over scarce water resources fuels community tensions that often manifest through gender-based violence.
Persons with disabilities face particular challenges. Emergency evacuations from flooding or extreme weather events often leave them behind. Climate adaptation programs rarely consider accessibility. Economic opportunities emerging from green transitions systematically exclude those with disabilities unless inclusion is intentionally designed into programs from the outset.
“Climate adaptation must therefore be inclusive and rights-based,” Mira argues. This is not merely an ethical position but a practical necessity. Climate responses that ignore protection risks or exclude vulnerable populations will fail to build genuine resilience. They may even exacerbate the inequalities they ostensibly seek to address.
EDUCATION AS PROTECTION: BUILDING RESILIENCE FOR GENERATIONS
Among the many interventions Mira has studied and supported, inclusive education holds particular promise as a long-term protection strategy. The evidence is compelling and consistent across contexts.
“Inclusive education is a protective intervention,” Mira states. “It reduces child labor, early marriage, and psychosocial distress while building skills, social cohesion, and future opportunities.”
Education provides structure and normalcy in chaotic displacement contexts. It creates safe spaces where children can develop cognitively, socially, and emotionally. It opens pathways to economic opportunities that reduce vulnerability to exploitation. And when education systems are genuinely inclusive, they become powerful tools for challenging the social norms that perpetuate exclusion.
“When education systems are gender-responsive and disability-inclusive, they become powerful tools for resilience and social transformation,” Mira emphasizes. A girl who completes secondary education is dramatically less likely to marry young or suffer intimate partner violence. A child with a disability who receives inclusive education gains not just knowledge but social capital and self-efficacy that protect throughout life.
Yet inclusive education remains aspirational in most displacement contexts. Schools lack accessibility features. Teachers receive little training on inclusive pedagogy. Curricula rarely reflect the experiences or identities of marginalized students. And when resources are scarce, inclusive education is often the first casualty of budget cuts.
Mira’s advocacy for education as protection challenges these priorities. It reframes inclusive education not as a luxury for stable contexts but as an essential component of emergency response. The investment required is significant, but the long-term protection dividends justify the cost.
LEADERSHIP IN UNCERTAINTY: THE QUALITIES THAT MATTER
What leadership qualities are most essential for professionals working in humanitarian protection and GESI today? Mira’s answer reflects her own approach to navigating complex, often contradictory demands.
“Ethical leadership, humility, and accountability,” she begins. “Leaders must be willing to listen, challenge power imbalances, and make evidence-based decisions even when they are uncomfortable.”
These qualities take on particular significance in humanitarian contexts where the stakes are high and the margin for error is slim. Ethical leadership means prioritizing the dignity and agency of affected populations over organizational interests or donor preferences. Humility means recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge and centering community expertise. Accountability means accepting responsibility when interventions cause harm or fall short of commitments.
But Mira adds another quality that is increasingly critical: adaptive leadership. “Able to navigate complexity and uncertainty,” she explains. Humanitarian crises are inherently unpredictable. Protection risks evolve. Political contexts shift. Funding priorities change. Leaders who require certainty and stability before acting will perpetually lag behind emerging needs.
Adaptive leadership embraces experimentation, learning from failure, and rapid iteration. It tolerates ambiguity while maintaining clear ethical commitments. It balances the need for evidence with the urgency of action. These capabilities cannot be taught in training courses. They emerge from practice, reflection, and a willingness to operate in the uncomfortable space between knowing and doing.
CULTURAL SENSITIVITY WITHOUT COMPROMISE: NAVIGATING THE TENSIONS
Perhaps no aspect of Mira’s work generates more tension than the question of how to advocate for rights-based frameworks in contexts where they may conflict with cultural norms or traditional practices. Her approach demonstrates that this apparent contradiction can be navigated with skill and intentionality.
“By engaging communities respectfully, understanding local values, and identifying entry points that align rights with lived realities,” she explains. “Cultural sensitivity does not mean compromising on rights; it means advancing them through dialogue, trust, and locally grounded strategies.”
This is delicate work. It requires deep cultural competence and genuine respect for local knowledge while maintaining unwavering commitment to human rights principles. It demands the ability to distinguish between practices that genuinely reflect community values and those that serve the interests of powerful actors at the expense of marginalized groups.
In practice, this often means finding allies within communities, elders, religious leaders, and traditional authorities who can articulate rights principles in culturally resonant ways. It involves demonstrating how practices like child marriage or excluding persons with disabilities contradict communities’ own stated values around family wellbeing and social cohesion.
Most importantly, it requires patience and a long-term perspective. Cultural transformation does not happen through confrontation or imposition. It emerges through relationships, dialogue, and the gradual building of new norms grounded in both rights and culture.
THE FUTURE OF PROTECTION: EMERGING TRENDS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Looking ahead, Mira identifies several trends that will shape the future of humanitarian protection and GESI globally. Understanding these trajectories is essential for organizations and professionals seeking to remain relevant and effective.
“Key trends include the localization of aid, increased attention to climate-protection linkages, digital risks and opportunities, and stronger accountability demands from affected populations,” she observes. “Intersectionality and data-driven inclusion will increasingly shape effective programming.”
The localization agenda, centered on shifting power and resources to national and local actors, represents both opportunity and risk. Done well, it can address the power imbalances that have long plagued the humanitarian sector. Done poorly, it becomes a cost-cutting exercise that burdens local organizations with responsibility without providing commensurate resources or decision-making authority.
Climate-protection linkages are only beginning to be understood and addressed systematically. As climate impacts accelerate, humanitarian actors must develop new capabilities to anticipate and respond to protection risks emerging from environmental change.
Digital technology presents a double-edged sword. Mobile money, remote service delivery, and digital identification systems create new possibilities for reaching marginalized populations. But they also generate risks around data privacy, digital exclusion, and surveillance. Navigating this complexity will require new forms of digital protection expertise.
Perhaps most significantly, affected populations are increasingly demanding genuine accountability from the organizations claiming to serve them. Social media and improved connectivity give communities unprecedented ability to document failures and advocate for their rights. Humanitarian organizations that cannot demonstrate meaningful accountability will face growing legitimacy challenges.
A LEGACY OF TRANSFORMATION: SYSTEMS THAT OUTLAST PROJECTS
When asked about the legacy she hopes to leave, Mira’s response captures the essence of her entire career. It is not about individual achievements or organizational positions. It is about systemic change that persists long after specific projects or roles have concluded.
“I hope to contribute to systems that outlast projects, systems where inclusion is embedded, communities are heard, and dignity is non-negotiable,” she reflects. “If my work helps shift institutions from intention to transformation, and empowers others to carry this work forward, that would be the most meaningful legacy.”
This vision acknowledges a uncomfortable truth about much humanitarian work: individual projects end, funding cycles conclude, expatriate staff rotate out, but communities remain. If interventions have not transformed the underlying systems that produce vulnerability, their impact evaporates when external support withdraws.
Mira’s commitment to systems change over project delivery, to empowering others over personal recognition, and to embedding inclusion over imposing it, reflects a mature understanding of how sustainable transformation occurs. It happens not through heroic individuals but through collective efforts that shift institutional cultures, strengthen local capacities, and establish new norms.
The test of her legacy will not be the number of projects implemented or reports published. It will be whether, in a decade, organizations operate more inclusively, communities have greater voice in decisions affecting them, and protection is understood not as a technical sector but as a fundamental commitment to human dignity.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF JUSTICE: BUILDING PROTECTION SYSTEMS FOR ALL
Mira Abu Moghli’s journey from witnessing exclusion in Palestinian communities to shaping protection systems across three continents demonstrates what becomes possible when technical expertise combines with unwavering ethical commitment. Her career has been devoted to a deceptively simple proposition: that humanitarian and development systems should serve all people, particularly those society pushes to the margins.
The simplicity is deceptive because implementation is profoundly complex. It requires challenging entrenched power structures, transforming organizational cultures, navigating political constraints, and sustaining commitment through protracted crises where progress feels glacial and setbacks frequent.
Yet Mira’s work provides evidence that transformation is possible. Community dialogue models that prevent child marriage. Partnership structures that shift power to grassroots organizations. Policy frameworks that embed inclusion into national strategies. These are not theoretical possibilities but documented achievements demonstrating that different approaches yield different outcomes.
As humanitarian crises proliferate and intensify, driven by conflict, displacement, and climate change, the need for protection approaches grounded in intersectionality, community ownership, and systems thinking becomes ever more urgent. The scale of human suffering demands not just compassionate responses but strategic interventions that address root causes.
Mira represents a generation of humanitarian professionals who understand that technical expertise must be matched by ethical clarity, that effective programs emerge from community partnership rather than external imposition, and that sustainable change requires transforming systems rather than managing symptoms.
Her influence extends through the policies she has shaped, the organizations she has strengthened, the partnerships she has built, and the professionals she has mentored. But perhaps her most significant contribution is demonstrating that principled, rights-based humanitarian work is not idealistic naiveté but practical necessity.
The voices she has amplified, the systems she has strengthened, and the power imbalances she has challenged create ripples that extend far beyond individual interventions. In a sector sometimes criticized for prioritizing organizational interests over community needs, Mira’s unwavering focus on dignity, inclusion, and justice offers a different model of what humanitarian protection can and should be.
As she continues this work across MENA and beyond, her example reminds us that meaningful change emerges not from perfect policies or unlimited resources but from persistent commitment to ensuring that humanitarian systems serve those they claim to protect. That legacy, embedded in institutions and embodied in empowered communities, will endure long after any individual career concludes.
