The School of Public Policy and Global Affairs is pleased to welcome Omneya Ghamry to our community as a Practitioner Fellow from September through to December, 2026.
Omneya, who hails from Egypt, is currently the Director of Policy and Advocacy at Save the Children in Egypt. Previously, she managed the Transnational Threats Program of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry’s think tank, the Cairo Center for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding (CCCPA). She also managed migration projects for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and has conducted political, security and legislative analysis for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in Egypt and in Bahrain. She holds an MA in Security Studies from Brunel University in London, an MA in Euro-Mediterranean Affairs from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and an LLB from Alexandria University, Egypt.
We learned more about Omneya’s work shaping humanitarian policy in Egypt as well as her interest in AI policy and regulation in our Q&A with her below:
What has been a meaningful moment in your career that underscores the need for good public policy?
It was the moment when thousands of displaced children started arriving to Egypt from Gaza and Sudan in 2023, with horrendous war injuries and amputations, leaving them disabled and traumatized. That’s when I started advocating for the protection of children, as part of the humanitarian response of Save the Children – Egypt Country Office. It was possible to establish a clear link between the magnitude of children suffering and the insufficiently-governed use of modern technology in warfare. And the broader context was clearly that where international humanitarian law, especially in relation to children protection, was poorly upheld. Not only in these two conflicts, but across the world.
It was clear that protecting the most vulnerable requires more than re-emphasizing the foundational principles of international law; it demands adaptive, technologically informed, and politically pragmatic policy frameworks that hold states accountable in an era of machine-speed warfare. Humanitarian organizations which are on the front-lines of conflicts, have immediate access to the impact of the use of AI-powered systems and other advanced systems in accelerating civilian harm in conflicts. For that, they are best positioned to inform, contribute to, and advocate for such public policies on the global and states levels.
What are you most looking forward to engaging in as an SPPGA Practitioner Fellow?
I look forward to collaborating with colleagues who focus on international law and global geopolitics to explore how child-specific protections under IHL can be embedded into emerging “Human-in-the-Loop” and human responsibility requirements for AI military systems. And to also research the ways geopolitical dynamics shape state resistance to binding regulation, and help identify pragmatic leverages through which child safety can be re-framed as a core normative red line rather than a discretionary concern for states involved in the current global AI governance processes.
During my fellowship, I will work on developing a Policy Advocacy Toolkit, for the use of non-governmental and humanitarian organizations, as well as offering practical strategies for linking technology monitoring, legal analysis, and high-level political advocacy. This output will hopefully provide humanitarian actors, policymakers, and advocates with tools to engage non-traditional targets of advocacy, such as governmental defense procurement officials, and software developers, with a concrete road-map for demanding accountability in an era of rapid developments in this area.
