Award-winning women’s rights advocate Dr. Alaa Murabit on SDGs and global health

The award-winning global security strategist, women’s rights advocate, and medical doctor, Dr. Alaa Murabit, is one of the leading global health and inclusive security experts of her generation. Her work has helped develop policies in 193 countries and impacted the lives of billions, and yet, she never intended to become an advocate.

On April 27, she came to Dawson as an Earth Week keynote speaker to share how her career came about, and her pivotal work on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the U.N.’s SDG Advocate and High-Level Commissioner on Health, Employment & Economic Growth.

From doctor to global influence

Growing up in Saskatoon, Alaa was set on practicing medicine. After completing high school at 15, she moved with her family to Libya in 2005 where she then graduated from medical school at the age of 21.

It was during the Libyan civil war that she experienced first-hand the crucial part that women played for the Libyan revolutionists while working at the Zawiya Teaching Hospital and makeshift clinics: “I would walk out of the hospital with medicine under my dress, and then walk to my car, sit down, and hope that nobody asked me to stand up,” she said.

She identified a crucial need for a formal policy that would ensure that the role of women did not stop at delivering information, medicine, or food during the conflict, but that they had an equal part in the country’s political and societal power structure moving forward.

Therefore, she founded and spearheaded her first organization, The Voice of Libyan Women, whose mission is to advance and protect women’s rights in Libya.

“I was single-mindedly determined to do medicine and then, I traded that up for something as completely crazy as trying to achieve women’s rights,” she shared.

Alaa began advising the U.N. Security Council on peace and security. After counselling over 40 heads of state, ministries, and public safety on the critical role of women’s inclusion in peacebuilding processes, she sensed an urgent need to measure progress.

“It felt like we needed something more concrete — a lighthouse that this ship was ultimately going to drive to where all these little pieces felt like they amounted to something bigger,” she said.

According to Alaa, the discourse surrounding the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, which were signed in 2000, was “prescriptive” and “Western-led” and failed to include peace and security.

And so, she pushed for a new agenda in late 2014: “We needed to turn it into something that is a lot more reciprocal and where all countries are held accountable at the same measures with very specific outputs,” she said.

After a year of lengthy deliberations and negotiations, the SDGs were passed in 2015 by 193 countries and continue to be the single largest and most significant international agenda in history.

“[The SDGs] include a very specific role on peace, justice, and strong institutions, which was the hardest one to negotiate given all of the different major power dynamics because one of the core pillars of that was that there could not be an infringement on the sovereignty and rights of other nations.”

Interconnected issues

As she focused on the SDGs, Alaa saw that she was able to marry her deep commitment to peace, security, and women’s rights, to her fulfilling passion for health.

“You can love that work, you can be incredible, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it fulfills everything you can mentally do to be effective in the long term,” she said. “The Sustainable Development Goals were in their own irony, more important for me to sustain my own work in this space because they gave me an interconnectedness on the issues.”

During her time at the London School of Economics, Alaa dedicated her research to global health and wrote a thesis advancing that the existing global health structures are “neo-colonial by nature.”

Her work led to the institution’s exploration into the potential of health for sustainability, and she was then appointed the U.N.’s High-Level Commissioner on Health Employment and Economic Growth to promote action to meet the global shortfall of trained health workers, the SDGs and to achieve Universal Health Coverage.

Driving change within your power

To foster social change, Alaa claimed that one does not necessarily have to join the U.N. or start an organization, but prompt action within their own capacity and “sphere of power.” She explained that true change consists of challenging friends, family, classmates, and others we are in contact with every day to think from a different perspective.

“It’s about how we actually influence the spaces we occupy,” she said.

Alaa suggested asking ourselves the following questions:

• Is there somebody representative from the local community here?
• Are they at the same table as the decision-makers or are they being brought in to consult?
• Are we having honest conversations about our accountabilities and our responsibilities to these communities?

Tackling difficult conversations

Her advice for holding tough conversations on social change is to remember that sustainable development is inherently emotional for reasons that are heavily rooted in racism, classism, elitism, and sexism.

“It has been the lesson of my life to appreciate that something I think should take one conversation and one policy will take me longer, but it’s worth it,” she said. “You get that desire, and the mission becomes bigger than yourself.”