Lynn Alwan

Lynn is an Associate Consultant with Dunecrest, working across the firm's sustainable infrastructure and socio-economic development practices. Her focus is on how climate finance reaches the institutions and communities it is meant to serve: how public and private capital is mobilised for adaptation and resilience, who is included in designing it, and whether the organisations channelling it can evidence results.

At Dunecrest, Lynn contributes to the firm's regional work with the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) on strengthening private sector engagement in Green Climate Fund (GCF) investment across Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Oman. She has supported the design of a regional engagement strategy to improve coordination between national designated authorities, prospective direct access entities, and private sector actors; assessed the barriers constraining project pipeline development in each country; and helped shape the structured national dialogues and country-level action plans through which the programme operates. She also leads on gender, equity, youth, and social inclusion in the firm's climate work, covering preliminary gender assessments and gender-disaggregated indicators, environmental and social safeguards risk screening for concept notes, and stakeholder engagement processes designed to capture the perspectives of women, young people, and communities most exposed to water scarcity and climate risk.

Before joining Dunecrest, Lynn built a foundation in research, monitoring, evaluation, and learning in some of Lebanon's most demanding operating environments. As a research, monitoring, evaluation and learning officer with Siren Associates, she supported a national institutional reform programme with Lebanon's Internal Security Forces, funded by the British Embassy in Beirut, consolidating national data for quarterly and annual reporting and strengthening evaluation and quality assurance procedures. She contributed to programme evaluations using outcome harvesting, process tracing, and value for money approaches. These are the same methods that underpin the results and monitoring frameworks climate funds now expect of accredited entities.

Her earlier work spans peacebuilding, gender, and crisis recovery. At MARCH Lebanon she managed a project countering conflict and radicalisation among marginalised youth, applying "do no harm" and conflict sensitivity standards to programming in contested areas. With Mouvement Social and UN Women she managed an economic empowerment project that took 160 vulnerable women through vocational training and into longer-term employment. She served in the protection unit of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), drafting policy briefs, advocacy notes, and case studies, and worked with A.T. Kearney and the Middle East Partnership Initiative on a multidimensional assessment of 60 non-governmental organisations to identify partnership candidates. Following the Beirut port explosion of August 2020, she coordinated a recovery programme for small and medium businesses in Mar Mikhael, combining targeted cash assistance with business promotion.

Lynn holds a master's degree in public policy and international affairs from the American University of Beirut, where she graduated with a grade point average of 3.95 and held a graduate assistantship. Her bachelor's degree, also from the American University of Beirut, is in political science with a minor in human rights and transitional justice, completed on the dean's honour list and supported by a MEPI-TL gender studies scholarship. She is a member of the Association of Lebanese Evaluators (LebEval) and holds certifications in project and programme planning, monitoring and evaluation, protection from sexual exploitation and abuse, and psychological first aid. She works in Arabic, English, and French.

Outside her consulting work, Lynn is director of community service for the Rotaract Club de Beyrouth (District 2452), where she leads initiatives on literacy, peacebuilding, and quality of life for underserved communities. She previously served as vice president of the Lebanese Red Cross Youth in Beirut, leading a team of 130 volunteers through the COVID-19 and port explosion response, and establishing a centralised database connecting patients with blood donors.