Alia El Mohandes

About Alia El Mohandes

Goals: To lead and direct teams and programs to design, manage and monitor integrated health, gender and socioeconomic projects with a focus on Youth, Gender Equality and Female Empowerment (GE/FE) and Gender-Based Violence (GBV) themes to reach vulnerable and marginalized populations, preserve their dignity, strengthen their social and economic status, with improved options to live productive and secure lives. International Health, Gender and Development Expert: with over 28 years in both the public and private sectors, in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. Extensive inter-disciplinary experience with multi-million dollar projects; Led multicultural teams in fragile, post-conflict and developing countries, results included policy change, institutional and human capacity building including gender and youth foci maximizing sustainable and resilient behavior change after funding ended. Native Arabic speaker with some basic French. In closing, I think that the most definitive skill-set in which I have gained proficiency while working with USAID is the ability to sustain continuous professional levels of productivity within fast paced work environments while managing multi-cultural staff. I have an in-depth understanding of how to maximize results while designing and managing integrated development goals within the continually shifting political arena and available resources. Specialties: Development, Gender and Health program design, manager, evaluation. Reproductive Health Expert; Maternal health and Child and Infant Health Care, HIV/AIDS programming Specialist and Advisor; Improving Human Capacity and Health Systems; Gender and Youth mainstreaming.

Experience

1. Nutrition Coordinator and Wash Team Leader

   USAID

   Oct 2021 — Present · Addis Ababa, ET

   Established and strategically led the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) Team, the largest WaSH portfolio in Africa ($164M), with $24.5M annual funding. Led the interoffice coordination of both WaSH and Nutrition portfolios and led Wash and Nutrition donor coordination.Mentored new staff to establish the WaSH team and coordinated across mission offices for both the WaSH and Nutrition activities for cross-sectoral programming. Designed and managed four WaSH procurements to award, establishing the WaSH portfolio. Expanded the scope, cost/time extension, of WaSH Flagship awards to respond to the ongoing drought with Ukraine supplemental funding to provide construction/rehabilitation of water boreholes for human and animal consumption and irrigation to small farmers, scaling up other WaSH private sector value chains for improved sanitation and hygiene products. Established a WaSH Secretariat at the Ministry of Water and Energy to strengthen donor and implementing partner coordination, integrating activities and leveraging donor resources for resilient and sustained results. Led the mission-wide nutrition working group in collaboration with the FtF Coordinator to ensure cross-office nutrition activities are working toward the common nutrition objectives articulated in the Global Food Security Agenda Country Plan and the Agency’s Multi-sectoral Nutrition Strategy. Represented the agency at the Scale-Up Nutrition Donor group (SUN) and led the Donor sub-working group.

Education

• Assiut University

  Medicine, Medical School

  1975 — 1982

• The American University in Cairo

  Diploma, Family Planning/Reproductive Health Policy & Research Design & Development, Middle East Region

• Harvard Kennedy School

  Master's of Public Adminstration, Leadership, Organizational/Human Capacity Building

  1991 — 1992

• International School of Tanzania

  Middle School (nineth grade), Junior High/Intermediate/Middle School Education and Teaching

  1968 — 1974