It’s my job to liaise with the UK government and others to encourage them to support our work. I also have a degree of oversight of budget submissions. When we submit funding proposals, we always attach a budget. If the bid is successful, we have to closely monitor budget uptake, work out where flexibility is needed, and appropriately categorise the money spent – particularly if a donor has an audit coming up. Colleagues lead internally on submitting proposals and running the projects, but I have strategic oversight. It’s my job to make sure the money is spent appropriately.

We try to promote locally led humanitarian response, rather than flying in and creating parallel response systems. So sometimes, rather than applying for money, we’ll support a local organisation to apply. When a new [project] proposal comes in, we decide whether to go for it based on our capacity to deliver, whether we have the right partners in place and whether the proposal aligns with our programming objectives and principles.

When you hold the purse strings, you can be involved from multiple angles. I’m now a partnerships person, but a critical and cross-cutting part of my role is financial knowledge, oversight and process. This involves understanding the need for and mapping out processes to understand how things function in reality, and how decisions are made and through which process.

“I started out with an idea that I would come in and be the saviour; now I’ve come full circle and realise that it’s easy to do more harm than good”

As a CA, you learn how to get to grips with an organisation and work out what the critical drivers for success are. My training and experience have given me the skills to diagnose areas of risk and give constructive advice. I learned how to be precise, targeted and practical in the recommendations I was giving.

You also learn to recognise the importance of collective endeavour and the need to understand the full picture of an organisation. When you see the system as a whole, and see it through from beginning to end, it’s easier to understand why something isn’t achieving the outcome you want. It’s never going to be perfect, but it’s easier to see all this when you’re the one who signs the cheques. You have to know when to send decisions up for approval, but often the decision sits with you.

Panoramic view

I try to put myself in the decision-maker’s shoes: what information do they need, what pressures are they under and what are the key decisions they need to make? The DRC has a consultative way of working, which fits with the Danish way of doing things and how our sector operates. We solicit a range of views and make sure the person making the decision is informed of people’s opinions. Often, there’s no clear answer, and we have to mitigate the uncertainty by making imperfect decisions with imperfect information, knowing those decisions will impact people’s lives.

Over five years at PKF Littlejohn, I travelled to 40 countries as part of a team carrying out field audits of humanitarian programmes. I saw many different programmes funded by the UN, NGOs, the Red Cross and other donors. We did both traditional financial audits and programmatic field audits. This entailed verifying that activities had been completed as agreed and that outcomes had been achieved in accordance with the funding. Then we’d make recommendations about how to run the programme more efficiently in the future.

I was with the British Red Cross in Haiti four years after the 2010 earthquake. Our brief was to move people from tents and transitional shelters to paraseismic shelters, which are earthquake-resistant buildings. We had to make a case that it was morally, practically and financially the right thing to do. I was the Finance and Administration Delegate, and had a £3.2m budget to manage. But I also had to support the Head of Mission to make the case that from a financial perspective it made more sense to invest now than to keep putting people in transitional shelters.

The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN) is looking to get more people with lived experience of forced displacement into leadership positions. TERN, where I volunteer, is moving from a traditional way of providing humanitarian assistance towards systems change. It believes this approach will support people more effectively and at scale – so that’s fewer handouts and a greater focus on local authorities supporting people. I mentor its Director of Systems Change, who is from Palestine and was forcibly displaced from her home.

I’m also No-Borders Director at Conversation Over Borders, which is a community-led organisation that supports refugees and people seeking asylum through free English lessons, wellbeing and digital inclusion initiatives and advocacy for systemic change. I contribute to strategic oversight, ethical governance and sustainability planning.

Being a CA got me my job with the DRC, even though it’s not a straight finance role. The senior decision-maker looked at my CV and said, ‘He has similar humanitarian experience to other applicants, but he’s also an accountant – we need more of that kind of skill.’

Basis for growth

It’s important to make the most of your skills and experience. In my first role at PKF Littlejohn, my university studies got me on to the humanitarian development team. I’d studied geography and economics with a focus on development. I wrote my dissertations on inter-regional trade in sub-Saharan Africa before and after apartheid, and on how conflict in northern Myanmar erupted in the wake of the democratisation process, smashing the idea that democracy automatically leads to peace.

Listen to and learn from the people you’re trying to support. If you like the idea of working in international development and humanitarian assistance, start with a clear understanding of what you think the impact is, but be flexible and willing to change your ideas. I started out thinking I would come in and be the saviour; now I’ve come full circle and realise that it’s easy to do more harm than good.

“We’re a rights-based organisation. We believe people have the right to move and seek asylum, which is a controversial thing to say in this climate”

We should be looking into corners of the world where we don’t necessarily look for inspiration. There are many successful models for integrating refugees: Uganda, Colombia, Jordan and Lebanon all host vastly more refugees than the UK. They afford refugees rights that we don’t afford them here. There’s no perfect model, but there are many more things we can do.

Most of the British public are supportive of the rights of refugees. Extreme views are growing, let’s not kid ourselves, but they’re still peripheral. You have to consider political context and understand that the presentation of facts is only going to get you so far in this environment. You have to make moral, political and economic arguments, as well as present the evidence. We’re a rights-based organisation. We believe people have the right to move and seek asylum, which is a controversial thing to say in this climate. But we also make the economic argument – refugees are entrepreneurial people who contribute. They employ people and pay taxes.

CA training and qualification is a brilliant entry point into the humanitarian assistance and international development sector. Many organisations work in this sector. AfID [Accounting for International Development] is a good place to start. It is a social enterprise that recruits accountants to provide pro bono volunteer support, financial training and permanent recruitment services to non-profit organisations, charities and NGOs.

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