My work at UNFPA

Now, I know more in detail what I am tasked to do at the Arab States Regional Office at UNFPA. I came to Cairo thinking that I would only work on data collection and analysis on Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH), but I was told that the Terms of Reference (this is what the UN calls a job description) was missing one more piece, which is to work with the Youth and HIV team. I was thrilled because I also wanted to work on youth issues.

So here is what I will be doing:

With the Youth and HIV team:

There will be a Regional Youth Forum in Tunisia happening at the end of October or beginning of November where about 200 youths from the Arab region will be attending. The forum will cover many areas such as youth, peace, and security, …, and Samir, my supervisor suggested me to take over a session and prepare a plan. Since I am interested in data, he suggested taking over the Innovation and Artificial Intelligence session which will cover how AI and Innovation can advance youth issues. I was really excited because this is something I have always wanted to do. I am very much interested in how technology and innovation can make public sector especially humanitarian sector more efficient and innovative. So, I will be tackling this. I have a direction of the session I have brainstormed. I will reveal it once my supervisor approves it!

With the SRH team:

There are a couple of work that I am doing. I am first collecting data on all maternal health and sexual reproductive health. I will be compiling country profiles of Arab States where it will include data on indicators related to the two topics. It’s going to be a lot of excel work! Then, I will be doing research to publish an article on a topic of my choice. I told Shible, my supervisor that I am interested in SRH in humanitarian context, and he was fine with that because he also does some work in humanitarian sector. Recently, I have been doing some research on Maternal Death Surveillance and Response (MDSR), which is basically recording data on indicators related to maternal death. Countries use this system to be able to analyze and reduce maternal mortality.

This sounds like a lot of work, but very interesting work. I don’t come from public health background so there is going to be a big learning curve, but everything is very interesting. The work here is definitely substantial and I feel that I will be learning a lot for the next two months.