LocationsMeet Ola, whose journey from an architect’s drawing board in Ramallah to UNDP’s Crisis Bureau in New York is a study in how resilience is built one brick, one blueprint, one community at a time.
From Architecture to Rebuilding Lives: Ola’s Journey of Purpose and Impact
August 19, 2026
Ola (second from right) with colleagues from UNDP Iraq in Mosul 2019 supervising a cash for work project.
UNDP Iraq
When I think about where this journey began, I don’t start with a job title. I start with the sound of metal shutters coming down on shopfronts in Ramallah, the sting of tear gas drifting over school walls, and the knowledge that any morning might be rerouted by a checkpoint that hadn’t been there the night before. We practised flexibility before we had a word for it. Some days school meant a classroom; other days it meant a a mosque or a neighbor's living room, because the doors we were meant to walk through were locked in front of us.
In my family of nine, education was the line our parents drew against uncertainty. “You still have your exam tomorrow,” my mother would say, even after a night that shook the neighborhood. It wasn’t denial. It was a discipline of hope — and I learned resilience the way children learn music: by repetition, until it becomes muscle memory.
As a teenager, I decided I would be an architect. I devoured images of buildings that bent light and gravity, and memorised sketches of lines that looked impossible until they weren’t. Zaha Hadid was the architect I looked up to — proof that vision could be louder than constraint. But my studies were shaped by more than design. During the Second Intifada, the fifteen-minute ride to Birzeit University could stretch into two hours of walking between concrete blocks and earth berms, carrying models that had taken weeks to build. Once, my best friend Wafa’a and I passed our architectural scale model between taxis and donkey carts like a fragile lifeline. Still, I graduated second in my class.
My first job as an architectural engineer was a short walk from home, at a small firm with good people and modest projects. After the political upheavals of the mid-2000s, clients had stopped asking what a building could say and started asking only how much it could hold. Form gave way to function. We optimised every square metre. I could do the calculations and the careful drawings — but I began to understand that what I wanted to build wasn’t limited to walls and roofs. What fascinated me most wasn't the structure itself—it was the difference it could make in people's lives. I wanted to build more than buildings; I wanted to help rebuild lives. That realization eventually led me beyond architecture and toward a career dedicated to strengthening communities and helping people recover from crisis.
Attending the Istanbul World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 as part of my work at UNDP PAPP
@UNDP PAPP
Discovering Purpose Beyond the Drawing Board
I didn’t go looking for the development sector so much as it found me through a door I hadn’t expected to open. When I sent my application to the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), I thought I was reaching beyond my lane. In the interview, they kept returning to a single line on my CV: the community work I had done as a student. That one line rerouted my life. I was hired as a junior expert and sent to Jericho, with mornings that started at dawn and days that ended after sunset, my notebook fat with names and questions.
The Jordan River Rift Valley became my first studio in the language of development. It is a beautiful, hard place — a belt of green strapped by rules and heat. I met families who lived through summers that clawed at 45 to 48 degrees without an air conditioner, who faced restrictions so intricate that expanding a home by a few blocks could trigger a satellite image, a warning, a demolition order. We held community meetings where we could: under eucalyptus trees, in courtyard shadows, at the edge of fields. I learned to measure materials I’d never been taught to list — time stolen by road closures, permission slips, trust, the weight of someone’s reputation, the exacting math of risk. This was architecture too, just with different materials.
I grew quickly because there was no other way. I entered as a junior expert, then became a national expert, then a local governance expert who could speak both to a farmer who knew every contour of his land and to a room of officials who knew every clause of the rules that hemmed them in. The projects were simple in description — income generation for families, community planning, small infrastructures of survival — but complex in execution. And I liked working that hard. It felt like the same muscle I had used to carry models across checkpoints, now stretched across the Jordan River Valley.
During a visit of a Delegation from Germany to the Al Shifa Hospital in Mosul, Iraq 2018
@UNDP Iraq
Learning What It Means to Transform Lives
At UNDP Palestine, the tools on my table changed again. I stopped drawing sections and started mapping livelihoods. We used a sustainable livelihoods approach that asked not only what a family lacked, but what they already held in their hands — skills, land, education, a good name in a crowded marketplace, even a pair of gold earrings that could be collateral. Then we asked how to build from there. This was building, too — only the beams were credit, confidence, training and networks, and the foundation was dignity.
I worked across the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, travelling to places that taught me new definitions of constraint. Eight months after we seeded projects, I would go back and listen. A woman would tell me the violence at home stopped the day she started earning an income. A mother would tell me that this year her daughter would finish school. Another would show me a ledger the way someone shows you a baby photo, pride warm in the numbers. I accompanied some to donor visits in the Gulf, North Africa and Türkiye, to exhibitions where they stood behind tables and sold what they had made with their own hands. One night, walking by the water in Kuwait after a long day, one of the beneficiary woman/ business owner told me what it meant to tell her violent husband “no” and have the means to enforce it. I have never forgotten her voice. That is the sound of a door opening.
My work took on a wider frame when I joined a multi-country programme focused on making markets work for women. We connected women to private sector partners, not only to sell but to be seen — as suppliers, as entrepreneurs, as decision-makers. I began to believe, even more fiercely, that empowerment is not the volume of your voice; it’s your radius of action. And that radius expands with income, with access, with someone opening a door and then stepping out of the way.
It should have been enough. But I kept feeling the small tug in my chest that meant a new chapter was calling. Sometimes growth looks like rest. Sometimes it looks like packing.
In Mosul Iraq 2019 with colleagues working at the Funding Facility for Stabilization
@UNDP Iraq
Stepping Into the Heart of Crisis
I applied to UNDP Iraq almost in secret — the way you step into a cold river to see if you can stand it. I told my family I would go for one year. I stayed over three.
My first trip into Mosul after liberation from ISIS is an image that still lives in my body: bridges ripped open, alleyways clogged with rubble, the smell of dust so dense it felt like a second skin, unexploded ordnance hiding in the quiet. But there were also ghosts of beauty everywhere — stonework that held its curve, lattice that still cut shadow into patterns, inscriptions that insisted on a different memory of the place. A city is a collective promise. Mosul had been broken, but not erased.
My mandate was practical: clear debris, reopen access, create jobs so that colleagues behind us could rehabilitate schools, hospital, homes and markets. I began with a small team and watched it growing big across Iraq while operating in one of the most complex post-conflict environments. The work demanded systems that could withstand pressure. . I designed and implemented monitoring systems that reduced fraud risks, prevented ghost workers, and ensured accountability across large-scale operations. I continually adjusted those systems every time someone found a new way to test them — because that is also part of rebuilding: you lay a road, and then you lay the rules that keep the road useful.
Nothing in a job description can tell you what it feels like to stand at a doorway and have a security specialist stop you because he’s seen a thread tied to the handle — nearly invisible, attached to a device you cannot see. There were days when our GPS coordinates mattered as much as our safety, when every movement had to be cleared 72 hours in advance, when the bridge you crossed in the morning would be closed by the afternoon. I went to Mosul twice a week for a year, through checkpoints that were efficient one day and tense the next, learning to read the mood the way a sailor reads weather. And all the while, I watched a city remember how to be itself again.
The Funding Facility for Stabilization that framed our work was the largest UNDP programme in history at the time, and within it my five million portfolio scaled up into a $60M operation, expanding impact, workforce, and delivery capacity under high-risk conditions.” Numbers matter because they make certain things possible — trucks, equipment, salaries — but what the numbers really gave us was momentum. I learned to work with ministries, governors and neighbourhood leaders whose priorities did not always align, and to hold the rope in the middle when tensions pulled at both ends. I managed a team that spanned languages and identities — Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, internationals — people who had lost more than I could understand and still showed up to help rebuild the place that had hurt them. Leadership in that context was part strategy part listening, and part staying calm when everything around you demanded urgency.
Iraq stretched the boundary of what I believed I could hold. It also gave me proof that when people have a chance to work, they will use it to repair not only streets and buildings, but the ordinary rituals that make a city human: tea poured for a customer, a child in a uniform, a door left ajar in the evening to catch a breeze. Those are the details that tell you a place is coming back to itself.
Posing with UN Women colleagues from the Afghanistan office at Maza Al-Sharif, 2020
@UN Women
When Everything Changes Overnight
Afghanistan taught me a different kind of strength. I arrived to work with women who were creating something of their own—startups, ideas, ambitions that stretched beyond what was expected of them. There was a sense of momentum, of doors opening. Young women were stepping into spaces that had not been designed for them and reshaping them anyway.
Then, in August 2021, the Taliban takeover changed everything. Almost overnight, that momentum was interrupted. We were evacuated as the situation deteriorated, leaving behind not just programmes, but people, partnerships, and unfinished work.
I will never forget our dispatcher that day—sitting quietly, holding back tears, not for himself but for his children, fearing they would grow up living through what he had lived. It broke something in me. In that moment, I found myself questioning what it meant to leave, and whether it was right to be the ones who could go. It reminded me of home—of moments when others left, and we stayed behind, carrying what came next.
And yet, a few weeks later, we returned—not to pick up where we left off, but to rethink how anything could still move forward. What had been a question of “how far can we go?” became “what is still possible?” More than anything, we wanted to reassure our colleagues that we had not left for good—that we would do everything we could to continue, together.
We had to think differently—quickly and constantly. Not in theory, but in real time. We adapted our approaches, explored private sector partnerships, created space for remote work, and looked for ways—however small—to keep opportunities alive. It meant redesigning how we worked, again and again, as the ground kept shifting beneath us.
For the women we worked with, this wasn’t just a programme adjustment—it was a daily negotiation of presence, visibility, and voice. And yet, they continued quietly and persistently. Some worked from behind closed doors, others through borrowed names—but none of them stopped thinking, building, or trying.
At the same time, I was navigating something equally complex within my own team. Colleagues were facing uncertainty, fear, and deeply personal decisions—whether to stay, to leave, or how to keep going under constraints that kept evolving. Balancing delivery while standing by them was one of the most challenging parts of that experience. It required not just coordination, but care, judgment, and constant reflection.
That period reshaped how I think about building. Sometimes it’s not about expanding or scaling—it’s about holding the line, preserving what can still exist, and supporting people to continue, even in the smallest ways.
UNDP SURGE training in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, November 2025
@UNDP
Reimagining What It Means to Build
Across contexts—from Palestine to Iraq to Afghanistan—I wasn’t just delivering programmes; I was shaping systems that allow others to act faster and more effectively when crisis hits.
When I joined UNDP’s Crisis Bureau in New York in 2023, I thought I was stepping away from the frontlines. In truth, I had simply moved to a different layer of the same work. My role now is to help design the architecture of response — the scaffolding that lets others move quickly when everything is falling.
I lead the design and continuous improvement of UNDP’s Crisis Response SOPs, shaping how country offices respond in the first critical hours of a crisis -the living blueprints that define who does what, when and in what sequence so that speed doesn’t come at the expense of sound judgment so that speed doesn’t cost us sense. I help shape and strengthen our SURGE capacity by developing high-intensity, immersive trainings that narrow the gap between simulation and reality. One of the things I am proud of is the development of the Early Recovery Hub, a digital one-stop on SharePoint that we built as a response to a recurring gap: knowledge existed, but it was scattered. We brought it together: guidance, tools, templates, top-line messages and step-by-step guidance into one platform but a reassurance when crisis comes, you won’t start from zero. Someone has thought this through before, and they left you a map.
Learning is our quiet superpower. Every time a country office responds, we review and inquire what worked and what didn’t and what needs tightening, conversations inform how we refine our tools, strengthen preparedness, and ensure that what we build is not static, but evolving.
I am also preparing for what comes next in my own journey. At the end of 2025, I successfully completed UNDP's competitive Deputy Resident Representative assessment and was selected to join the DRR Pool. — another doorway I once never imagined it belonged to me.
At the United Nations General Assembly on the occasion of its 80th anniversary
@Ola Karakra
Working across both Country Offices and Headquarters has given me a perspective few opportunities could. In the field, I learned what it means to lead through uncertainty and stay close to the people we serve. At HQ, I learned how corporate policies, crisis systems, and global decisions shape the support that reaches those on the front lines. Together, these experiences have reinforced my belief that meaningful leadership connects strategy with reality.
My aspiration is to bring that perspective back to a Country Office — to help shape decisions that strengthen institutions, support communities and governments, and ultimately improve people's lives.
Looking back, every step—from architecture and local governance in Palestine, to Afghanistan and Iraq, and ultimately to New York—has been preparing me not simply for a position, but for a greater responsibility to serve. The
Through-Line: Building When the Ground Shakes
Over time, my understanding of what it means to build has changed.
Architecture taught me to see structure in complexity, to understand what holds things together, and to work within constraints. Crisis work asked me to apply that where it matters most—when conditions shift quickly and communities are working to regain stability.
I have come to understand that my strength lies in working within uncertainty—not waiting for clarity, but finding ways to move forward and support progress, even when conditions are fragile.
As much as I sometimes think about stepping away from crisis—having grown up in it and spent much of my career working in it—something always brings me back.
It’s the moments that stay with you. In Iraq, walking through streets once covered in debris, surrounded by grey concrete and demolished markets, and then, over time, seeing those same places come back to life.
Sometimes it’s as simple as a message or a photo—friends tagging me in posts, showing streets that are open again, shops that are thriving, and people moving through spaces that once felt impossible to cross. Those moments stay with me, etched in my memory.
These are quiet reminders that this work matters—that even in the most difficult places, change is possible, and that what we build can help make it last.
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