Naeema Gul

Consultant - Humanitarian Response & Global Governance

Naeema Gul is a Humanitarian Programming and Stakeholder Engagement Specialist with Manāra Policy & Practice, where she designs program interventions, coordinates multi-stakeholder initiatives, and translates policy frameworks into actionable responses to humanitarian and development challenges. She brings over a decade of experience designing interventions for crisis-affected populations, coordinating across complex institutional landscapes, and integrating climate resilience, protection, and disaster risk reduction into programming across Pakistan. Naeema currently works with the Food and Agriculture Organization in Islamabad, leading program design and stakeholder coordination for climate resilience and food security interventions. Previously, she held senior positions at Mercy Corps, Muslim Aid Pakistan, the International Organization for Migration, ACTED, and WWF Pakistan, where she designed humanitarian and development programs addressing displacement, climate shocks, protection crises, and community resilience. Her work has consistently centered on translating needs assessments and political economy analysis into program frameworks that respond to the realities of crisis-affected communities while navigating donor requirements, government protocols, and civil society capacity. She has coordinated multi-stakeholder initiatives bringing together government agencies, international organizations, and local civil society actors, negotiating agreements across divergent institutional cultures and building coalitions that enable effective humanitarian response and development programming in fragile contexts. Her expertise spans humanitarian program design, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, protection programming, and stakeholder coordination across government, donor, and civil society spheres. She specializes in designing interventions for vulnerable populations affected by humanitarian crises, climate stress, and displacement, with deep understanding of Core Humanitarian Standard principles, accountability to affected populations, and climate justice frameworks. Naeema excels at analyzing governance systems and power dynamics to design programs that are both technically sound and politically feasible, ensuring interventions account for the institutional constraints and political economy realities that shape implementation. Her background in global governance enables her to bridge international policy frameworks with local implementation contexts, translating global standards and donor priorities into context-sensitive programming that serves affected communities. Naeema holds an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford and a BS in International Relations. At Manāra, she applies her humanitarian programming expertise and global governance lens to intervention design, stakeholder engagement, and translating policy analysis into implementable programs.