Â鶹Éç

Sophia Swithern joined the Â鶹Éç Media Action Board of Trustees in January 2017.

I’ve spent most of my working life involved in humanitarian and poverty issues. My interest began when I was a student seeing Bosnian refugees arrive in the UK and watching the war unfold on the news. As soon as I graduated I joined a group of volunteers to assist with the reconstruction in northern Bosnia. It was a humbling basic lesson in aid – we had to quickly lay aside everything we thought we were there for and listen carefully to what people told us they needed.

Since then I’ve worked with UNHCR, with Oxfam and then with Development Initiatives in programme, policy and research roles, and am now working as an independent consultant. It was while training refugee journalists at UNHCR that I came across the newly-formed World Service Trust. I’ve watched it with interest over the years as it developed into Â鶹Éç Media Action.

When I joined Oxfam in 2003 to work on refugee policy and research, the humanitarian system was working out how to learn from Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda to ensure that civilians weren’t just given food and shelter but also protection.  During my ten years at Oxfam, I worked in a number of roles, including in Liberia and eastern Congo, training teams and running protection programmes. As we talked to people and designed and evaluated our progammes it became clear that trusted information was as essential as material assistance. This meant communication channels to help affected communities make critical decisions about how best to protect themselves as well as to make sure that their voices were heard by the responsible local, national and international authorities.

In my role as Head of Research and Analysis at Development Initiatives, I added a passion for data to my preoccupation with information. Leading a number of research consultancies and projects, including the Global Humanitarian Assistance report, I became fascinated by the potential of data to change lives as well as the power and politics involved in achieving this. In an age of data overload, it remains a challenge to make sure that the most vulnerable are counted, that the right responses reach them in the right way, and that this data is accessible to all.

Joining Â鶹Éç Media Action as a trustee is a real privilege which draws together many of these threads. Its projects are clearly grounded in strong and well-considered research which asks ‘who needs what where?’ and evaluates what works best. Now more than ever, Â鶹Éç Media Action has a vital role to play in giving people the skills and information for people to make decisions about their safety and their health and to hold their leaders to account.