In the sustainability space, where abstracts never really make it to reality, there is a new breed of leaders that is rewriting the rules of how lasting change is made. These are not people who calculate carbon footprints and write reports in isolation. They take a seat with communities, hear their issues out, and craft systems that close the loop between global promises and ground realities. They understand that sustainability is not about following fashions; it’s about reacting to what people actually need, now, with fairness and integrity.
As the Middle East steps up its sustainability agenda, juggling ambitious climate ambitions and urgent social needs, such stewardship is more essential than ever. The region comes with unique environmental and social challenges, water stress, youth unemployment, and energy transition, which need to be addressed in locally context specific yet globally benchmarked solutions.
Where Trust Begins
Menna Gomaa’s journey into sustainability began not in a conference room, but in the field. As Director of ESG Engagement & Corporate Reporting at Masader, she brings almost a decade of experience in ESG strategy, reporting, and stakeholder engagement. Her approach was shaped by a defining early experience- walking into her first public consultation to support stakeholder engagement for Environmental and Social Impact Assessments on mega local projects in Egypt.
Sitting with residents, local officials, workers, and business owners, she immediately understood something fundamental: this work isn’t abstract. It’s about people’s livelihoods, safety, and dignity. That realization became her compass. From that day forward, she committed to designing three living systems in every engagement, treating them as day-to-day management tools rather than paperwork exercises.
The first system is a Stakeholder Engagement Plan built on two-way dialogue and a “you said, we did” feedback loop. The second is a Local Content & Gender Action Plan with measurable targets for local jobs, SME spending, and women’s participation. The third is a Community & Worker Grievance Mechanism with multiple access points, protection from retaliation, and time-bound resolution protocols.
This framework came to life during the Benban Solar Park (the world’s largest solar energy project) operation phase in Aswan, Egypt. She sat with nearby communities to understand their priorities, co-created job pathways, ensured women’s voices were present, and built the accountability systems that keep promises on track. Those early field days taught her that sustainable outcomes are built on trust, and trust is built on listening well, communicating clearly, and closing the loop on concerns.
She pursued formal credentials to strengthen her impact, becoming a GRI Certified Sustainability Professional Trainer and Certified Sustainability Assurance Practitioner. She expanded her work from project-level ESIAs to enterprise-level ESG strategy, disclosure, and assurance. Yet her approach still traces back to those rooms and roundtables: bring empathy and evidence in equal measure, design systems that listen, and measure what matters.
Leadership as a Living Practice
For Mrs.Gomaa, leadership in today’s sustainability-driven world means leading with vision, values, empathy, and justice. It’s not about having a title; it’s about setting an example that encourages others to act responsibly. She strives to be the kind of leader who listens as much as she speaks.
True leadership involves bringing diverse stakeholders together, research scientists, business executives, and community members, and forging a shared vision for a better future. Justice serves as the compass that keeps that vision grounded in real lives. Procedural justice asks whose voices are heard and how decisions are made. Distributive justice asks who shares in the gains and who bears the risks.
She often says that a sustainability leader needs to have one foot in the present and one in the future. Leaders must manage current needs while keeping a steadfast eye on long-term impacts. Empathy plays a huge role in this balance. Justice extends that empathy into accountability, including intergenerational justice: the duty leaders owe to those who will inherit the results of today’s choices.
She measures success by how well she can inspire and empower others to carry the sustainability agenda forward. She defines leadership as the ability to inspire collective action for the common good, all while demonstrating integrity, resilience, and a commitment to justice.
The Art of Balance
One of the greatest challenges in sustainability leadership is balancing long-term impact with immediate business needs. She approaches this by integrating sustainability into core business strategy so that long-term initiatives support immediate goals and vice versa. She translates sustainability metrics into the language of business performance.
She often reminds executives that companies excelling on ESG metrics are better equipped to handle future risks and opportunities. When framed this way, sustainability isn’t a trade-off against immediate needs; it’s a strategy for resilience.
In day-to-day decision-making, she strives to find win-win situations. When there are tensions, say, a project could yield quick profits but harm community trust, I convene across-section of stakeholders to co-design out-of-the-box, from low-cost to feasible solutions, that protect trust and do not shift burdens or risks onto any party. Often, transparency and dialogue can reveal that the “business need” and the “sustainability need” aren’t opposing forces at all.
As the only Practitioner Certificate in Sustainability Assurance (PCSAP) qualification in the MENA region, awarded by AccountAbility, the global body behind the AA1000 Standard, she meticulously evaluates how long term ESG commitments (like climate targets or diversity goals) contribute to risk management and brand value. Her approach is to embed long-term thinking into the DNA of organizations, creating a mindset where long-term impact and short-term success feed into each other rather than compete.
Breaking Through with Conviction
The path to leadership, especially for women, often comes with challenges. One defining moment came early in her career when she had to present an ESG strategy to a group of CEOs and senior executives at a diversified portfolio holding company. She was the only woman in the boardroom. Relatively young at the time, she sensed some skepticism.
The initiative involved adopting precise ESG targets, action plans, reporting standards, and launching a community investment program. Initially, the reception was lukewarm. Instead of feeling defeated, she went back and fortified her case. She gathered more data, aligned her proposal with business objectives, and highlighted competitor benchmarks. She returned with not just passion, but solid evidence and a clear business rationale.
Securing the green light was a milestone; the real triumph has been watching the holding company execute with rigor—translating targets into clear action plans and KPIs, implementing them by the book, and accelerating progress at scale. It taught me two powerful lessons. First, perseverance; I learned that setbacks can be overcome by preparation and conviction. Second, it underscored the importance of credibility. That experience pushed me to further strengthen my expertise so I would be beyond reproach when advocating sustainability. In fact, it motivated me to pursue advanced certifications. I wanted to ensure I could stand my ground confidently, armed with knowledge.
She often mentors younger women in her team, sharing this story and encouraging them to never let a moment of doubt stop them from pushing forward. The lesson she carries is that every challenge is an opportunity to grow, and sometimes leaders have to create their own seat at the table. Overcoming that early barrier also made me acutely aware of how women sometimes must prove themselves extra in leadership roles, particularly across parts of the MENA region, where women’s leadership is still gaining visibility and trust, even as momentum for change accelerates. It instilled in me a responsibility to pave the way for others. And when you are also a mother, there is sometimes a perception that you won’t be able to balance executive responsibilities with family duties; it’s a real challenge. Yet motherhood has sharpened my ability to prioritize, deepened my empathy, and strengthened my resilience as a leader. It also instilled in me a responsibility to pave the way for others.
Human Stories at the Core
For Mrs.Gomaa, keeping human impact at the center starts with a simple discipline: listen first, then co-design with businesses or communities, not for them. She often says the true definition of sustainability is continually learning what a country truly needs right now and responding with dignity and justice.
In Egypt, that means recognizing everyday realities families face, employment, affordability, inclusion, and water security, and building initiatives around those needs while advancing our climate commitments. Egypt has a comprehensive National Climate Change Strategy (NCCS 2050), yet the social dimension of the transition requires just as much focus so progress is both fast and fair today.
Translating those realities into opportunities for clients is a game-changer. With youth unemployment still being fairly low and female labour force participation still in the mid-teens, projects become pathways: apprenticeships, local hiring targets, SME supplier development, and practical enablers such as safe transport and childcare.
She helps organizations build fair, accessible protections into their operations- clear site inductions, contractor standards, and grievance channels people trust and actually use. Given that the banking sector and financial institutions constitute her key clientele, she strategically aligns their corporate social investment initiatives with national development platforms, including Takaful and Karama. This ensures that training and inclusion programs are plugged into what already works at scale.
Early in her current role, she led stakeholder engagement at the world’s largest solar energy project in Aswan, the Benban Solar Park. She helped develop a comprehensive Stakeholder Engagement Plan and Local Content & Gender Action Plan, ensuring local people shared in the benefits and women had a voice in the project’s rollout.
No matter how strong our policies are, if we forget the human element, we miss the point. She keeps human impact at the core of my leadership approach through active stakeholder engagement and empathy-driven planning. Concretely, this means she spends a lot of time listening to those affected by our projects: employees on the ground, local community members, customers, and even critics.
In every project, she asks: Who is impacted by this, and how can we involve them? She promotes a culture where her team remembers that behind every metric, there are human stories. If an initiative doesn’t uplift people, they go back, listen again, and redesign until it does.
Innovation as Fuel
Innovation and sustainability are two sides of the same coin: sustainability sets the goalposts (like net-zero emissions, circular economy, social equity) and innovation finds the pathways to get us there, in her view. In short, she believes that her role is to create an environment where innovation thrives—where the team feels empowered to ask “why not?” and pursue novel ideas that advance sustainable practices. Today’s sustainability problems need tomorrow’s solutions, and those will come from thoughtful, disciplined experimentation.
Her team holds cross-disciplinary brainstorming sessions during strategy, reporting and policy design because diversity of thought sparks creativity.
At Masader, they run an incubator to nurture eco innovations and sustainable solutions, giving team members a sandbox to test ideas. She has found that mimicking this into the department’s team giving people the freedom to fail is key. The focus is on thoughtful, disciplined experimentation: not every test succeeds, but each one teaches. She internally promotes a culture where her team remembers that behind every reduction target or every sustainability report metric, there are human stories. She often shares success stories of individuals, say, a family that gained access to clean water or an employee whose idea was implemented, to remind everyone why we do what we “ I returned to that boardroom with not just passion, but solid evidence and a clear business rationale, and that experience taught me that perseverance and credibility can overcome any barrier.” do. By keeping communication open and focusing on co creating solutions with people, we ensure that our sustainability initiatives improve quality of life and earn genuine support.
Creating Ripples of Change
Mentoring the next generation, especially young women who want to lead in sustainability, is both a responsibility and a source of optimism. She actively makes herself available, mentoring junior colleagues and participating in external mentorship programs. She shares candid stories of her own journey in industry seminars and training sessions.
Menna Gomaa also sees influencing the next generation as something that goes beyond formal mentoring. It’s about representation. By taking on visible roles, leading high profile projects, she hopes young women see what’s possible and feel inspired.
Her goal is to build a ripple effect. If she mentors five people, and they each mentor five more, the impact grows exponentially. They’re cultivating not just individuals, but a community of principled, passionate sustainability leaders.
Success Beyond Numbers
Success in sustainability leadership is ultimately about real-world impact and cultural change. Menna Gomaa gauges success by asking: Are we making a genuine difference? One measure is the positive change in people’s lives and in the environment. Another sign of success is when sustainability becomes embedded in organizational culture-—when sustainability stops being an initiative and becomes “how we do things”—is a major victory. She also considers it a success when stakeholders trust the organization. If employees feel proud of the company’s values, if the community sees the company as a genuine partner, and if investors regard it as responsible and forward-thinking, she believes that signals success beyond the KPIs. Ultimately, it is about leaving a legacy of positive impact. When she sees both immediate smiles—for example, from a community the team has just supported—and lasting commitments, such as a company policy change that endures beyond her tenure, she knows the organization is winning in sustainability leadership. Those human stories and long-term shifts in mindset are, in her view, what matter most—far beyond any report cover.
Bridging Global and Local
The principle “think global, act local” guides much of her work. Menna Gomaa takes global goals like the UN Sustainable Development Goals and translates them into concrete local strategies.
When she crafts sustainability strategies, she ensures they align with global frameworks but breaks them down into what they mean on the ground.
A concrete instance of this was our work on the Benban Solar Park project in Egypt. The global goal is expanding renewable energy access (SDG 7), but locally it meant training local workers to participate in the solar industry, setting up community grievance mechanisms, and even small things like scheduling construction in a way that respected local community times and wildlife patterns. Likewise, when working with banks on sustainable finance, we consider global principles like the UN Principles of Responsible Bank (UNPRB), Equator Principles or Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), but implement them by financing local green projects or developing products for local farmers and entrepreneurs to adapt to climate change.
Menna Gomaa spends time acting as a translator between international commitments and local action, ensuring lofty goals guide day-to-day decisions.
A Legacy Worth Building
If she could crystallize her legacy into one message, it would be this: always lead with purpose and heart and never underestimate the ripple effect of your actions. She wants future leaders to know that every small step counts and that integrity is non-negotiable.
Menna Gomaa’s message is one of optimism: we have the tools, knowledge, and collaborative spirit to tackle these challenges, and strong, compassionate leadership will be the catalyst. The legacy she aims to leave is a community of empowered sustainability champions. Her guiding principle is simple: let your guiding star be the positive change you want to see, and know that with passion and persistence, you can indeed change the world.
