Mouna Al-Sulaiti

Mouna Fadel Abdullah Al-Sulaiti is Executive Director of Volunteering and Local Development at Qatar Red Crescent.

She was the middle daughter in a family of thirteen children. After her parents separated, she grew up under the care of her paternal grandmother, who became her first model of leadership. Although unable to read or write, the older woman taught responsibility, self-reliance, patience, judgement and generosity, while insisting that education should illuminate the future. Those lessons formed a confident personality willing to create opportunity rather than wait for it.

Early marriage brought substantial responsibility. She had to reconcile the roles of wife, mother, homemaker and student while continuing her education alongside her children. Separation later became the most disruptive turning point of her life. The first response was frustration and despair, but the values inherited from childhood helped her rebuild, rearrange priorities and take responsibility for three children.

Humanitarian work became the field in which she found both passion and purpose. She regarded the ability to hear people in need and respond to them as one of her most important personal achievements. Giving was not an additional activity but a professional and ethical direction that shaped her approach to leadership.

Her academic and professional record supported that work. She earned a master’s degree in executive public administration from the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and graduated from Qatar Leadership Centre. She received the title Humanitarian Ambassador from the International Organization for Social Responsibility and served in roles including Chair of the Board of the Girls’ Creativity Centre, Assistant Dean at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Director of the Qatar Pavilion in Korea and member of the Strategies Committee at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

At Qatar Red Crescent, she became Executive Director of Volunteering and Local Development. Her responsibilities combined volunteer culture, local development and institutional humanitarian action. She also maintained a particular interest in women’s empowerment and in ensuring that women’s competence and leadership were recognised in public and community work.

She treats competence and passion as the central conditions for achievement. Difficult situations do not lessen her appetite for work; they encourage her to seek people who raise the quality of her thinking, set a clear objective and then give creativity room to operate. Repeated attempts, including mistakes, became a practical source of knowledge.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, she intensified her efforts with other Qataris. The crisis, in her view, corrected ideas about humanity, required adaptation and alternative solutions, and demonstrated the practical meaning of volunteering. Cooperation across Qatari society formed a protective wall and turned a period of hardship into a lesson in service.

Despite senior responsibilities, motherhood remained her first duty. She built a relationship with her children based on advice, freedom of choice and responsibility for decisions, seeking to raise independent people through experience rather than control. The consequences of separation made that task harder, but their progress and character became the clearest result of the life she had rebuilt.