Shomsia Ali
Business Development Director
Shomsia's career has always focused on social inclusion: working with and supporting underserved communities and individuals to realise their potential and human capital. Her career started off in the UK, in the field of employment, providing skills and training support for marginalised communities, including those with long-term health challenges and disabilities such as mental ill health.
She has extensive experience of working with and for both the public sector and non-state sector, including local NGOs and large-scale for-profit private organisations. Whilst starting on the frontline, delivering services directly to service users, Shomsia has held senior leadership positions within local government in the UK and a FTSE 100 company.
More recently, Shomsia spent two years as an Advisor to the Global Fund (AIDS, TB and Malaria), managing a $10 million project across eight low- and middle-income countries. There she implemented a range of programs improving engagement with the non-state sector to deliver more outcomes for vulnerable communities. This included a number of programs focused on outcome-based contracting.
Throughout her career, Shomsia has been involved in results-based financing, including outcomes-based contracting. She has been on the frontline, delivering and managing outcomes-funded services; on the business development side, designing, tendering, securing and then mobilising multi-million pounds outcomes-funded programs and also, more recently, on the commissioning side: procuring and performance managing outcomes-funded programs.
Shomsia is currently a Special Advisor to Healthy Brains Global Initiatives, supporting the mobilisation of the organisation, including developing its outcomes-based contracting mechanism to fund and deliver programs at scale addressing mental health and its associated socio-economic cause and consequences—so that no one’s life is limited by neurological or mental health problems.
Shomsia holds an MA in Modern History from the University of Oxford.