UN-affiliated, international Policy Advisor and Public Figure Sara Ketabi is known for being the Founder of CollatEd Lab, a policy lab dedicated to accelerating global governance and development. The young innovator has already made a name for herself with long-term strides in her diplomacy and international affairs career, such as working alongside the Prime Minister of Libya, H.E. Abdullah Al-Thinni, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Dr. Abdulhadi Ibrahim Lahweej on domestic foreign policy and other cross-cutting issues.
“Libya is one of the richest countries in North Africa but home to some of the poorest people,” Ketabi says. “This in itself reveals to be largely a systemic issue that continues to be addressed by acknowledging appropriate levels of intervention and implementing actionable foreign policy strategies,” Ketabi adds.
As a leading foreign policy and international development consultant in Africa, Ketabi’s ongoing projects in Libya focus on post-conflict development, human rights, public health, and sustainable foreign policy through a unified governance lens. To date, on behalf of CollatEd Lab, she has conducted research and hosted federal policy consultations on the geopolitical implications of sustainable development on international security, and for using foreign policy as an intersectional tool to steer a (sustainable) social transformation in an effort to minimize the consequences of civil-war-rooted human rights infringements within the past decade of conflict in Libya.
As Libya is entering a new era of political innovation and state-building, the rest of the developing world will similarly and continuously rely on multi-sectoral partnerships with organizations as transparently unique and powerful as CollatEd Lab and institutions such as the United Nations for access to solutions-oriented academic research and reliable resources in dealing with highly complex human rights, democracy, foreign affairs, and other current challenges to civil society.
Sara has delivered her policy insights at different top universities across the US, Norway, and Africa through the Sustainability Think Tanks initiative she founded, connecting these institutions’ resources with international governments and the UN, facilitating multi-sectoral collaboration. This has proven to be the most useful strategy integral to her foreign policy consulting. As a result, she had the opportunity to collaborate with internal governments to improve data analysis systems with prime ministers for greater appreciation and application of data analytics, sparking a transformative shift in Libya and international African politics.
The Libyan government has accepted a position on her NGO’s Global Advisory Board and is committed to the organization’s expansion and impact. Because of this ongoing collaboration, Ketabi has been nominated and recently appointed as a Senior Lecturer in global health and human rights at the University of Benghazi, where she teaches field-specific research methods and details on breakthroughs of the NGO’s policy projects. She has also been given (by the Prime Minister) the 2020 Technology and Government Champion Award for significant contributions to the development of Libya. As a consequence, Libya has recently renewed a 5-year partnership and investment contract with CollatEd.
With CollatEd Lab and its CEO, Sara, Libya is looking to revitalize diplomacy training over the next ten years to further integrate academia in multilateralism policymaking.
