Change maker: Inclusive

Heba has been working at Islamic Relief Palestine since 2011. She has had the opportunity to move into a number of positions including MEAL Officer, and currently is the Quality Assurance Officer.

In 2018, she was appointed to lead capacity building programme in protection and inclusion. She has a vision to change the implementation of programs in the organisation to be inclusive and protective by mainstreaming the principles of protection and inclusion in all policies, manuals and procedures, as well as programs and projects to reach more justice and inclusive communities.

Heba aspires to show strength and inspire others with their potential to succeed. She always seeks to spread a culture of learning amongst female and male colleagues by sharing the good practices and learning results from evaluating projects. Heba trained her colleagues on topics related to gender, protection and inclusion, and how to consider them in all life cycle of projects.

She trained staff on how to identify barriers that prevent voices from being heard and to provide solutions to remove these barriers through providing the reasonable accommodations to people at risk especially people with disabilities. She led a series of workshops and focus groups discussions to develop an inclusive feedback and complaint mechanism. She represented the Office in a three-day protection and inclusion global workshop as well as the Global Safeguarding Summit in Turkey in October 2019.

She led the advocacy programme during the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence and participated in writing a learning paper on gender. She also participated in conducting a number of self-assessment/audits for the office and provided means of verifications in gender mapping, disability, and safeguarding. Recently, Heba is leading on inclusive feedback and complaints and how people with disabilities can reach out to Islamic Relief current policy on feedback and complaints and use it to report any issues.

Heba is working with people with disabilities and their representative Organisations for People with Disabilities to better identify barriers to inclusion and how to overcome those barriers. Finally, Heba holds an MBA as well as a bachelor's degree in English literature. She lives in a refugee camp going through difficult circumstances, constant threats, challenges and barriers, Heba has managed to achieve high standard results on inclusive and protective programming.

This article is based on an interview conducted by A Good Day in Africa. Listen to the full interview below.