International consultant at United Nations | United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Aala has been working as an international consultant for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime since 2016.

Her role involves:

• Designing family skills programmes and tools for families in challenged settings such as conflict affected or low resource settings. More recently designing a package of tools in response to parenting under COVID-19. Read more …
• Setting up and implementing research projects to evaluate family skills programmes globally and training staff on research skills. This includes developing appropriate protocols, designing research studies, and identifying evaluation tools.
• Leading training globally on Family Skills programmes and research methods. This has been in person in over 15 countries, and more recently online due to COVID 19 travel restrictions.
• Working with multiple global field teams to identify needs and develop an implementation plan that meets the needs, and takes into consideration funding, ethical and practical restrictions as well as meets governmental guidelines. Then execute implementation plan and report results.
• Writing institutional reports and academic publications.
• Developing an online platform to provide remote training in contexts of travel restrictions.
  Presenting implementation and research activity at United Nations global expert meetings and other international organisations and conferences

War Child Holland

• Programme development consultant
• Providing expert guidance to the design and implementation of a family intervention for refugees in Jordan
• Involved in developing programme content, training and evaluation tools

Chemonics international

• Development of Better Together, a psychosocial and trauma recovery intervention for caregivers and their children residing in refugee camps in North East Syria
• Leading programme content development and training resources
• Leading facilitator training
• Supervising implementation of programme in refugee camps

Children and War Foundation CAW

Aala is an accredited trainer on the Children and War trauma recovery programme ‘Teaching Recovery Techniques’. Along with colleagues Professor Rachel Calam and Dr Kim Cartwright she has developed a caregiver arm for this evidence based programme, for which this version of the programme is called ‘Teaching Recovery Techniques & Parenting’.

This version has been implemented with Syrian refugees in Turkey and Lebanon successfully. Aala is involved in developing a distance learning package for this advanced version of the programme to increase the accessibility of the programme to those in low resource, conflict or unstable settings.

Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust

Aala has worked as a consultant for Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust’s Culture and International Mental Health Research Group. She worked with Professor Nusrat Husain in assisting the Trust towards the service development and integration of mental health services among Ethnic minority groups.