Ben

Hi there, my name is Ben Allen and I’m the Technical Support Team’s Deputy Coordinator. My main responsibility is the coordination of technical support requests - alongside Andi, Sanja, Angeline and Rasha. I focus specifically, on support requests that are “in-depth” – or that require several weeks of dedicated support from an Advisor. This includes working with the requester to find the most appropriate Advisor or team, funding and developing a ToR. Once this is in place, I support with the administration and logistics of the support (contracts, flights, hosting arrangements etc.), making sure the requester and advisor have all they need to get the job done through monitoring and follow-up. Most recently I have been tackling finding the right resource for four assessments in Angola (available Portuguese-speaking SMART experts where are you!?) and supporting one of our CMAM Advisors (Elena) who is working with the Nutrition Cluster in Venezuela.

I am especially interested in how we can better support local and national organisations. We have made great progress but still, have lots of work to do in making our service more available for these more grassroots organisations.

I have over 10 years of experience in humanitarian and development contexts, across Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan largely focussing on monitoring, evaluation, learning and research for nutrition in emergencies, with expertise in coverage assessments for CMAM. I have an MSc in Public Health in Development and BA(Hons) in Anthropology.

I am based in Norwich, UK, with my wife and baby daughter.

Ben is hosted by Action Against Hunger Canada