What should be the role of donor agencies in Africa in the coming years? This is the question that is central to this year’s CSAE Conference closing session. Our speakers for this session are Lindy Cameron (DfID), Albert Engel (GIZ) and Matthew Spencer (Oxfam). Stefan Dercon (CSAE) will chair the session, which starts at 16:30 UK time. Unfortunately, there is no video feed available for this session.
Lindy Cameron has been Director-General for Country Programmes in the UK Department for International Development (DFID) since January 2016. She is responsible for DFID’s geographical teams and the successful delivery of DFID’s bilateral programmes across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the aid-dependent Overseas Territories. Her previous DFID roles included Director Middle East, Humanitarian and Conflict, Deputy Director Middle East, and Head of DFID’s Afghanistan office (Kabul, 2006-7) and Iraq office (Baghdad, 2004-5). Her cross-government roles have included Director Stabilisation Unit, Senior Civilian in Southern Afghanistan and Head of the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Unit for the FCO (Lashkar Gah, 2009-10) and Deputy Director Africa, Trade, Development and International Institutions for the Cabinet Office.
Lindy began her career as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co, before joining the Civil Service as a Governance Advisor in DFID, working in Nigeria, Vietnam and the Balkans from 1998 until 2003. She read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, and has a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, USA, where she studied on a Fulbright Award. She attended the UK military’s Higher Command and Staff Course at Shrivenham in 2008 and was a member of the Royal College of Defence Studies 2010-11. She received an OBE for her services in Iraq in 2004.
Albert Engel is Interim Director General of the Africa Department of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The Africa Department is one of GIZ’s three regional departments. Operating in over thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa and employing more than 4,000 staff, the department steers and supports the implementation of commissions and activities in the countries it covers. His previous positions with GIZ included Deputy Director General of the Sectoral Department (the GIZ service provider in sectoral skills, methods and tools) as well as longer-term assignments in Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Born in 1958, he obtained higher education degrees in International Agricultural Development at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; International Rural Development at Technical University, Humboldt University, Berlin and Agronomy at Georg-August-University, Göttingen.
Matthew Spencer is Oxfam’s Director of Campaigns, Policy and Influencing, where he is responsible for driving Oxfam’s key campaigns, including inequality, rights in crisis, women’s rights, and food and climate justice. He has spent much of the last 30 years working on UK and international environmental issues, initially as an ecologist, then as a campaigner and most recently as an advocate for a greener economy. Before joining Oxfam, Matthew was director of Green Alliance, the UK’s leading environmental think tank, working with civil society, business and political leaders to achieve policy change.
Prior to that, he was head of government affairs at the Carbon Trust, and campaign director at Greenpeace UK, where he developed its campaigning strategy; he was also the founding chief executive of the renewable energy agency Regen SW. The early part of Matthew’s career was spent working on tropical forest conservation in Latin America, exposing him to rural development challenges and public campaigning, inspiring an enduring interest in bringing about social and political change for a fairer and more sustainable world. He is passionate about the power of people and organisations to make a positive impact on poverty and inequality.
There is no video feed for this session. You can also follow this session on Twitter, the conference hashtag is #oxcsae2017. Make sure to follow our own @Oxford_CSAE twitter account for the latest updates.
