Rania is a Gender Team Lead at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). She has over 14 years of experience in international development and has led programmes focused on gender equality, poverty, livelihood support and unemployment reduction, working with international organisations including Oxfam GB and UN Women. She has also managed a range of projects via partnerships with government, civil society organisations, and research institutes.
Highlights of Rania’s work include a project on multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis with the government of Jordan undertaken during her work with UNDP; conceptualising and managing gender needs assessments in six countries and a regional analysis aimed at informing strategy development at UN Women; and the management of a regional multi-stakeholder programme at Oxfam that supported the leadership and political participation of women, and in particular those living in poor and rural areas. As part of her work for Oxfam, she developed and led a regional small grants component that funded promising initiatives by emerging grassroots women and youth organisations in remote, neglected, or impoverished areas.
Before becoming a Gender Team Lead, Rania worked with the UNDP Jordan office to conduct needs assessments of the country’s informal economy. She also carried out needs assessments for young Palestinian men and women living in Jordanian refugee camps on behalf of the civil society organisation Arab Renaissance for Democracy & Development (ARDD). In addition to providing strategy and programme development advisory support to ARDD, in 2019 Rania raised 2.2 million euros for an ARDD initiative focused on refugees’ livelihoods and protection.
An architect by training, Rania completed an MA in Urban Management at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. As an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, Rania acquired a second master’s degree, completing an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2018. Her LSE dissertation explored the politics of austerity in Jordan, focusing on 2018 reforms to the national bread subsidy.