About - Tarek Sheikh AL-Shbab

I am a senior data engineer. I build the systems humanitarian organisations run on: the pipelines that carry registration data, the warehouses behind distribution reporting, and the dashboards people actually make decisions from.

Seven years of that, at the Norwegian Refugee Council, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, the IFRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent — cash programmes worth $56M and more, an emergency registration system that took in a million households in 72 hours, and cloud data platforms on Azure, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Most of it written in Python.

Before that I built robots, ran competitions and started companies in Damascus. Those are in the blog.

Worked with

Norwegian Refugee Council
Mercy Corps
Oxfam
IFRC
Syrian Arab Red Crescent
Khamsat
Smart Walkie
Hsoub
Alpha Apps
AlphaZed
Tabo Akdar
System 7

The route

Damascus

2013 – 2018

Nateqa, Startup Weekend, Tech Live, Bit Code, ICT Incubator, WRO
Damascus

2018 – 2023

Syrian Arab Red Crescent, Oxfam, freelance
Geneva

2023

IFRC
Kyiv

2023 – 2025

Norwegian Refugee Council
Nairobi

2025 – 2026

Mercy Corps
Yangon

2026 – now

Norwegian Refugee Council

What it added up to

3M

people registered in 72 hours

The Syria-Türkiye earthquake, February 2023. One million households.
$56.6M

in cash delivered

Pipelines carrying 2M+ registration requests to 206,000 people in Ukraine.
1.5M

people reached in Sudan

One Azure data platform joining 12+ NGO partners for cash assistance.
191

national societies

A federation-wide data model and forecasting framework, built in Geneva.