Noran Aly was born and raised in Egypt by an Egyptian father and a Syrian mother; with six younger sisters. This initially aroused her interest to understand the lives of vulnerable families of similar numbers, but living under dire conditions. She took her first step by obtaining her bachelor's degree in Economics with minor in Statistics from Cairo University. She previously worked as an economic researcher at the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development, where she delved deeper into the realm of public policy and socio-economic programs’ technicalities. One of the challenging strategic programs that Noran took part in was the “Programs and Performance-Based Budgeting” in collaboration with the USAID; through being co-responsible for monitoring and evaluating the ministries’ performance indicators on the central level. Noran’s work and academic experiences ultimately shaped her mindset to look forward to exploring brand-new approaches of strategic planning and evaluation techniques of poverty alleviation to help livelihood and food security projects meet their intended results and impact on their beneficiaries, especially in rural areas of Egypt, and possibly on the global level. Noran is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Development Practice (MDP), as a recipient of Sawiris scholarship, at Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. As a credit requirement of this master’s program, she took part in the summer field experience in Guatemala for a client named ‘Rainforest Alliance’ in the Maya Biosphere Reserve with other community partners. During her field work, she co-worked on a number of projects that supports the communities’ livelihoods along with conservative forest management, including conducting export readiness assessment (ERA) of Ramon, business plan for community cooperative named ‘COADAP’, assisting communities in developing grant proposals to access external funding, and feasibility study for the communities to produce and export Ramon cookies as a value-added product.
Advisor
Ragui Assaad
Education
B.S. Economics with Statistics minor
