My father has a mantra which he drilled into me during my childhood: ‘understand what someone needs and offer it to them before they ask for it’. He, in turn, had learned it from his father, a farmer. Combined with the stories about his time as a UN peacekeeper in 1960’s Cyprus, this fostered values of service and made me curious about foreign lands beyond my native Sweden.

In 2011, this curiosity brought me to Damascus, Syria to study Arabic. I arrived three weeks after the official outbreak of the war, and during my five-month stay, I witnessed how Syria went from a middle-income country with more tourists than Australia, to a country under siege by its own regime. Experiencing fragility first hand made me interested in understanding the forces that contributed to this radical transformation, and how they might affect other countries across the world. Seeing my Syrian friends being forced to flee or struggle to survive informed my purpose; to help improve the conditions for people in the world’s most challenging situations to fulfill their potential. 

I returned to Sweden and earned a degree at the Stockholm School of Economics, before spending the next six years living and working across the UK, US, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UAE, Turkey, Rwanda, and more. Primarily, I helped create and manage organizations and programs that bridged the skills gap by providing young people with the skills they needed to secure economic opportunities, but which universities didn’t teach them. I also helped design and implement pro-poor, and human-centric solutions to intractable issues within healthcare and housing.

Currently, I’m pursuing a Masters’s at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service to complement my on-ground experience with policy-design skills. I’m also supporting a track-II dialogue on Afghanistan at the Atlantic Council.

I have been honored to write for outlets such as Harvard Business Review Arabia, the United Nations, Arab News, Pakistan’s largest English language newspapers, and the World Economic Forum, where I’m also a Global Shaper. I started my career as a professional opera singer at the Royal Opera of Stockholm, and try to sing as often as I get the chance.