Cardiff Met Leader Champions Women in Resilience
Cardiff Met’s new Risk & Resilience Manager is no stranger to high-pressure environments – bringing first-hand crisis experience and a proven record of making an impact.
Ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, Sioned Warrell, a Cardiff Met alumna, brings expertise in crisis management and resilience, honed in some of the world’s most challenging humanitarian contexts.
Early in her career, she was deployed to Afghanistan and Yemen with Save the Children through a trainee scheme with global humanitarian organisation Elrha, supporting staff and partners in regions affected by conflict and natural disasters.
In Kabul, she worked across nine provinces, including Kandahar, supporting disaster risk reduction, proposal development and donor reporting. She also visited programmes and contributed to aid distributions for women, children and internally displaced people fleeing conflict, as part of the United Nations’ Kabul Informal Settlement (KIS) Task Force.
Aid included essential non-food items such as water, sanitation and hygiene supplies, emergency shelter materials for families who had lost their homes to avalanches, landslides and flooding, and winter clothing for children in Kabul’s informal settlements to help prevent deaths during temperatures as low as -25°C.
“My role involved developing item specifications, overseeing the tender process, reviewing samples and coordinating storage, warehousing and distribution,” she explains. “As a woman, I was able to spend time with some of the recipient families, listening to the experiences of women living in makeshift shelters.”
Sioned also gained insight into the realities of life and work in a post-conflict setting – from visiting the OMAR Mine Museum and the war-damaged Darulaman Palace to supporting logistics such as warehouse procurement.
Her six months in Afghanistan were followed by a five-month posting to Yemen, based in the capital Sana’a, home to the Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage site. There she continued to support Save the Children’s operations and resilience reporting alongside international colleagues.
“Operating in those environments was personally challenging,” she recalls, “but it reinforced my commitment to supporting others and helping to build resilient systems and communities.”
In these male-dominated, high-stakes environments, Sioned made her mark as a female leader, taking responsibility for complex projects, guiding colleagues through difficult circumstances and ensuring vulnerable communities received the support they needed.
Returning to the UK, she further developed her expertise managing major incidents with Natural Resources Wales, the South Wales and West Mercia Local Resilience Forums, and later at the UK Resilience Academy as Resilience Capability Lead for Crisis and Incident Management. In these roles, she led incident response at a national level and helped shape resilience planning and emergency preparedness across multiple organisations.
Now at Cardiff Met, Sioned is focused on applying the principles of preparedness, collaboration, and learning she developed overseas and in the UK.
She is working to strengthen the University’s approach to risk and resilience. not just in systems and procedures, but in how staff and students work together confidently and safely.
“Effective risk management works best when it’s a shared responsibility,” she says. “Resilience isn’t just about systems; it’s about people working together with confidence and care.”
This International Women’s Day, Sioned’s journey highlights the impact of female leadership in challenging environments, demonstrating that courage, skill and empathy can create real change.
Her story is a reminder that women make a difference at every level, from international crisis zones to our campus community, and that strong, collaborative leadership strengthens everyone around us.