Development Cooperation Handbook/Interviews/Manoj Kumar

Manoj Kumar, Country Director of Concern Worldwide, an International NGO .

The interview was taken on December 2010 at N 2 River, Freetown Peninsula, Sierra Leone



The interview has been used in the following development cooperation stories:

⇒  Mothers Preparing Mothers - Susan and Cline Bays      ⇒ playlist

⇒  Women as Entrepreneurs - Petifu Chain     ⇒ playlist

What is Concern and what is the role of International NGOs in international development cooperation?
Concern empowers people to overcome poverty by helping them to produce more food, get access to a reliable food supply, reduce their vulnerability to droughts, improve their access to water and generate more income to spend on their children’s education and health care.

Its aim is to ensure access to quality education for the poorest and most marginalized people.



Our prime partners are the communities themselves. The entire focus of Concern is build capacities of the most vulnerable communities

What is the learning that your gained while working on the ground ?


Sometimes the donors should be more flexible, because the contest in Sierra Leon is a very dynamic contest and they should respect the local contest and the local reality. Donors also need to give a sufficient time to aloud the community processes, to bring the changes which are long lasting and not just a quick change and when the donors support ended those changes collapse.

There is a lot of learning from the work of different organizations, NGO, donors, even agencies, but there is very less of sharing those learning. Very often you find the agencies reinventing the wills. There is some coordination, but is not very effective, it don’t goes beyond sharing those key learning and complementing each other to improve program quality, to improve the life of the people