Putting Concern on the map in the United Kingdom

WILD GEESE: Rose CaldwellExecutive Director, Concern Worldwide UK

ROSE CALDWELL has moved far from her roots on a farm between Ballymoney and Ballymena in Co Antrim. Following accountancy with KPMG in Belfast, Caldwell indulged a love of travel with a job as an internal auditor for InterContinental Hotels, “going to all sorts of interesting places, like China and Nicaragua”, before returning to Belfast.

There she had “a very nice job, career and life”, but she “suddenly decided” in 1998 to apply to Concern before she “became terribly sensible”.

“I had always had an urge to work for an international aid agency. I don’t know where that came from,” she says.

Soon, she was asked if she would go to Burundi: “When they did [ask], I immediately said ‘Yes’ and then looked it up on a map, I had no idea where it was, although I knew that horrible things had happened there.

“It was a life-changing experience. I covered Rwanda, also. I went out for six months. I was supposed to slot back into my job in Belfast but it never happened. I couldn’t go back into the private sector; the fit wasn’t right.”

After working with a Belfast-based housing charity, Caldwell returned to the Concern fold, working alongside veteran Mike McDonagh in Zimbabwe in 2002/03 to set up the agency’s operations there.

“He is a bit of a legend in Concern. In the beginning, it was just the two of us and a couple of laptops. Within four months, we were distributing World Food Programme food-aid to half a million households,” she recalls.

Since 2008, Caldwell has led Concern Worldwide’s UK operations, with more than 20 staff in London, 17 in Belfast and two in Glasgow.

She also deals with 40,000 regular donors and leads the aid organisation’s advocacy work with the British political system.

Opening doors is tougher in London than in Dublin: “It is a different environment. Much more planned and it is much harder to get access and to get our message heard than it would be in Ireland, where everybody knows us.

“You have to manoeuvre and hit the right buttons at the right time. You just can’t go with a message when there is no appetite for it to be heard,” she said, adding that government money was becoming more important to all aid organisations.

In particular, aid organisations want to keep the British government tied to the mast on its pledge to increase overseas aid to 0.7 per cent of the UK’s GDP – a commitment prime minister David Cameron has backed repeatedly despite the mounting doubts of Conservative MPs.

“I think there is fatigue around the whole debate, especially during a time of austerity. We are pushing the government to include that in the next Queen’s Speech, but it is not something that the public, if polled on it, would necessarily feel supportive of,” said Caldwell.

Despite tougher economic times, Concern’s British donors have stayed loyal: “In 2008, we all thought there would be a huge drop in our income from our supporters. In fact, we have held pretty steady,” she said.

Concern is a member of the Disasters Emergency Committee – a 14-strong union of aid charities that has run major television fund-raising campaigns in the UK to cope with the Haitian earthquakes, the East African famine and other crises in recent years.

Despite the need to secure government backing, individual donors are Concern’s life-blood as their contributions can be used at the organisation’s discretion rather than being tied to specific programmes as is usually the case with official money.

Last December, Concern UK published research in alliance with the National Research Institute in Greenwich on the outcome of interventions by the Rwandan government to help its smallholder farmers.

“There has been no investment in agriculture over the last 20 years in developing countries. British aid would be focused on economic growth through agriculture, but a lot of the group we serve – the very poorest of the poor – is never going to be supplying Marks Spencer.

“That is completely unrealistic. But what you don’t want them to be doing is moving to urban centres, you want to keep them

on their land and make them as productive as they can be so that they can feed themselves. Migrating to cities solves one problem with another.”

Maintaining Concern’s profile and “brand” is a permanent struggle. “There are a couple of big boys out there, Oxfam and Save The Children. They have a long established history, just like Concern has in Ireland. They’ve had the money to invest in it,” she went on.

“One of the challenges for me over the next few years is to raise our profile in the UK. In Ireland, prompted recognition of Concern – the ‘Have you heard of Concern?’ question – would be something like 94 per cent.

“In Northern Ireland, it would be 53 per cent and here it is 17 per cent. That is one of the very big challenges for me, to increase that awareness,” she said.