About the Author

Chris Cattaway

Author

As an employee and as a consultant in both the commercial sector and the development/humanitarian (non-profit) sector, Chris’s 20+ year career has ranged from designing multi-million dollar telecommunications systems to managing emergency humanitarian aid programmes in Africa and Asia. He has traveled extensively in the developed and developing world. He twice journeyed overland from London to Cape Town, once driving his own Land Rover, and has visited 27 countries in Africa.

Graduating with a degree in Biomedical Electronics, Chris’s career started as a Design Engineer and Project Manager in the international telecommunications industry, working on some of the first fibre-optic telecommunications networks projects.

Chris started his humanitarian work with Medecins Sans Frontieres in the refugee camps in, what was then, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) following the genocide in Rwanda. He worked in Taliban-controlled Southern Afghanistan. He was Oxfam’s Country Representative in Burundi during a particularly insecure period in that country’s civil war, and set-up therapeutic feeding programmes in Ethiopia. In 2001 he was responsible for Save the Children’s response to the earthquake in Gujarat, India. He established, Save the Children’s emergency programme following the earthquake Bam, Iran. In 2008 he headed-up Save the Children’s emergency response to Cyclone Nargis.

He has held the PMP certification since 1997, and, in 2003, completed a full-time MBA at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His first employment after finishing his MBA was in The Philippines, as a consultant, assisting a multi-national manufacturer of Ethernet-based networking equipment to adjust its organizational culture, and to set-up processes to sell leading-edge triple-play network solutions throughout the Asia Pacific region.

Currently, as an independent consultant based in London, Chris works internationally in the NGO and private sectors. He has taught Project Management for NGOs to Masters students at The Roehampton University. He is currently managing the setting-up of a Consortium of 15 major British Humanitarian Agencies which, with funding from the British government’s Department for International Development, will revolutionize the funding of disaster responses and associated capacity building. In recent years he has managed a global capacity building programme for a major international NGO and advised its directors on projectising the implementation of the organisation’s strategic objectives.

As a founder member and Principal Advisor to Project Management for NGOs, he is heavily involved in setting up this new global initiative which will increase the project management capacity in international development agencies worldwide , and, with support from the APM Group has established the first internationally-recognised professional certification scheme for NGO Project Managers. Part of this work involves teaching a project management course, contextualised for the development sector, to project managers from developing countries, both face to face and in a virtual (live online) classroom. In the past 3 months, Chris has delivered the course in The Philippines, Qatar and Afghanistan.

In addition to Project Management training, Chris facilitates Leadership training, and workshops which help individuals, teams and organisations in all sectors to work more effectively together. Chris passionately believes that sharing skills and knowledge between different sectors is invaluable, and he takes pride in being able to work equally confidently and competently in both the private sector and the development sector. He can be contacted via www.pm4ngos.org.