Lila Raouf, founder of the impostErs
Lila Raouf is a practitioner and researcher working at the intersection of education in emergencies, refugee-led initiatives, and the localization of international aid. Her research focuses on how displaced communities organize and sustain their own education systems during crises, and how these efforts challenge dominant assumptions about expertise in humanitarian response. Drawing on fieldwork with refugee-led education initiatives, her work examines how lived experience, community leadership, and local knowledge shape education responses in ways that are often overlooked within formal aid systems.
Professional Background & Research
Education Does Not Wait: From Africatown to Refugee-led Schools
Social Justice Is Localization: What Refugee-Led Education Initiatives Teach Us (Published by INEE)
Why I Started The Imposters
I started The Imposters after noticing a recurring dynamic in professional spaces: conversations about communities affected by crisis often happen without those communities fully represented as experts in the room. These moments led me to reflect on how expertise is defined in global development, and why practitioners with lived experience can sometimes feel like outsiders within systems designed to support their communities. The Imposters was created to explore and challenge these dynamics by recentering aid around affected communities and documenting the knowledge, leadership, and expertise that emerge from lived experience.
It’s actually quite simple.
I got tired of being in rooms where my own lived experience was explained back to me.
That’s why I created The Imposters.