For over ten years I worked in the developing world, first with REST, the humanitarian arm of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, then as Field Representative for CARE in the Dominican Republic and latterly as an urban poverty specialist with the World Bank, based in Washington D.C., but working in Southern Africa. These experiences taught me a huge amount about both participative approaches and the potential of inter-disciplinary collaboration – the contexts in which I worked were places where lateral thinking and ingenuity were the only way forward.
