Phil Vernon

Phil Vernon has been engaged in development, humanitarian and peacebuilding work in Africa since 1985. He has worked in over a dozen African countries and lived for several years each in Sudan, Lesotho, Rwanda, Mali, Ghana and Uganda. He returned to his native UK in 2004 and since then has been a Director of Programmes at International Alert, a peacebuilding organisation. In 2010 he was the lead writer of Working with the Grain to Change the Grain: Looking Beyond the Millennium Development Goals, a critique of overseas development aid which proposes an alternative model of support to people in poor and fragile contexts. He has beeen a trustee of the charity Build Africa since 2005, and a member of mining company BHP Billiton’s Forum for Corporate Responsibility since 2010. He has a MSc in Environmental Forestry, lives in West Kent and enjoys cross-country running. This is his personal blog.