Nancy Okail is the Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. She holds a Ph.D., with a focus on power relations of foreign aid, from the University of Sussex in the UK. Prior to joining TIMEP, she was director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has more than 13 years’ experience in promoting democracy and development in the Middle East/North Africa region, and is a visiting scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Okail has worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and has managed programs for Egyptian pro-democracy organizations that challenged the Mubarak regime. She was also one of the defendants convicted and sentenced to prison in the widely publicized case of 43 nongovernmental organization workers charged with using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt.