Yasmine Sherif is the Director of Education Cannot Wait (ECW) established at the World Humanitarian Summit.

A Swedish national, Ms. Sherif is a lawyer specialized in international humanitarian, human rights, and refugee law (LL.M). She first joined the United Nations in 1988 and has served with the humanitarian, development, and peacekeeping arms of the United Nations.

With 30 years of professional experience, including with UNDP, OCHA and UNHCR, and international NGOs, Ms. Sherif has served in New York and Geneva, as well as in some of the most crisis-affected countries on the globe: Afghanistan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Jordan for the Syria-crisis. In addition, she has led missions to Bangladesh, Chad, the Central African Republic, East Timor, Kosovo, Guatemala, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Uganda.

Ms. Sherif’s long-standing service to crisis-affected populations (refugees, internally displaced, children, and women), covers a broad range of operational humanitarian and development assistance programs in crisis/post-crisis settings, strategic policy-making at all levels, and management of highly effective and results-driven teams.

Ms. Sherif has also worked as an Adjunct Professor at Long Island University (LIU) responsible for the masters’ program on the United Nations and human rights and has published on humanitarian and development issues, as well as international law. She has appeared in the media in Scandinavia and the US and is also a Huffington Post blogger. Ms. Sherif is the author of the book, The Case for Humanity: An Extraordinary Session, which was launched at the United Nations in New York in 2015. In 2017, she received the annual “Sweden’s UN Friend” Award.