Tim Foster is a qualified civil engineer who has specialised in emergency humanitarian response. He has worked for civil engineering consultants, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Oxfam, MSF, CARE and IFRC in Europe, Africa and Asia. He has been involved with RedR since the early eighties, was the first Director of RedR International's Secretariat and more recently a RedR UK trustee.
Tim has regularly acted as a resource person, trainer and convener for RedR’s emergency relief training programme and contributed to both editions of Engineering in Emergencies. More recently he has co-facilitated training workshops for Emergency Shelter Cluster Coordinators for IFRC/UNHCR. He is co-author of Financial management for emergencies, the lead author for Managing people in emergencies and helped develop and edit the Emergency Personnel Network web site. Recent projects include a series of training workshops for the Health Cluster and a review for IFRC of the shelter cluster in Tajikistan.
Tim's key competencies are in needs assessment, programme design, management and evaluation, organisational development, training and learning. He has a keen interest in exploiting the internet in his work. His mother tongue is English; he is fluent in French.