Lama Elhatow

Lama has 13 years of work experience in the Environmental field, 9 of which are as an Environmental and Social Specialist at IFC (part of the World Bank Group) working on projects in sectors including Manufacturing, Infrastructure, Services and Financial Markets. She has worked on a wide range of projects across the Middle East and North Africa as well as a few projects in Sub-Saharan Africa including Mozambique and Nigeria. Many of Lama’s projects include complex infrastructure such as hydropower development on a transboundary watershed in Pakistan, as well as the world’s largest solar park – the Benban solar park in Aswan, Egypt where she acted as the focal point lead. 

Lama was also been engaged in the UNFCCC climate change negotiations for 5 years from 2009-2014 as a climate policy officer, lobbying governments to reduce their GHG emissions whilst following both the mitigation and adaptation tracks quite closely through the International NGO Climate Action Network (CAN).

Lama’s specialization is in climate change and water resources with a specific emphasis on transboundary water management. Lama has a Bachelor’s degree (B.Sc.) in Construction Engineering and a Masters’s degree (M.Sc.) in Environmental Engineering from the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Her Doctorate degree (Ph.D.) in sustainability from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, has enabled her to work across various cross-cutting fields to assess the ecologic, economic, policy-oriented, social, and governance-related factors related to water and climate change. Her dissertation; “Climate Change as an opportunity for cooperation on the Blue Nile River Basin” has utilized the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus approach to outlining win-win benefit sharing opportunities for the three countries of the Blue Nile (Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan) for a sustainable transboundary approach to water management.

Lama is a passionate environmentalist and an avid learner of the complexities of our ecosystem and is often amazed at the interconnectedness of everything within it.