International relief expert to help sell Sheffield abroad

Phillip Greene, aged 36, has been appointed to run Sheffield International Developments (SID), which has been launched by Sheffield Chamber of Commerce to spearhead its international consultancy work.

The Chamber wants to use SID to build on a string of contract successes with the European Chambers movement, the European Union and the United Nations.

The new company is the first of its kind in the UK and international chambers of commerce movement.

It has been set up to undertake international contracts to provide support, advice and expertise to less developed countries seeking to build up business support services and international trade.

SID is intended to build on the Chamber’s runaway successful in winning contracts to provide training and expertise abroad sinc)e it first dipped its toe in the water only three years ago.

The Chamber, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, has won 16 of the 17 contracts it has bid for, helping to develop business support and international trade operations.

“My role is about building on the work Sheffield has started, generating more of an international perspective for the city,” says Phillip Greene.

He is currently living in Stockholm, where he is finishing a Masters degree in Economics, and will run SID from his Scandinavian base until the end of the year, when he moves to the UK.

“I want to take the Sheffield ‘brand’ out beyond Yorkshire and the UK. The Chamber of Commerce has achieved a lot in the last 150 years and in particular has laid many foundations in its capacity building work with recent projects in Cambodia and trade missions to places such as Egypt.

“I want to take some of this success further afield into other emerging and developing countries.

“But this is a two-way process – it is also about how other countries across the world can contribute to Sheffield and its growth, too. We want the city to learn more about the key components of economic regeneration through becoming more international.”

Philip Greene has spent the last 10 years working in far-flung places. He has managed more than 40 national staff in five project locations and helped the equivalent of about 30,000 families in 12 camps, providing shelter, water, sanitation and relief.

He was working for Dutch relief organisation ZOA Refugee Care, as a programme manager in Sri Lanka, when the tsunami hit the country in 2004.

“I was there when it hit and we had to change gear completely and focus instead on relief operation. Previously I had been working with the communities which were being established or re-established after conflict had affected the region but we were suddenly dealing with an entirely different crisis which saw me going directly into communities to work with and for tsunami victims,” he recalls.

Before that, he worked on a humanitarian relief project in Afghanistan, coordinating and liaising with the UN and other relief agencies and national organisations, overseeing the rehabilitation of more than 100 houses in Kabul City and the setting up of a food-for-work programme for widows.

Work in a similar role took Phillip to Kosovo, where he helped establish a new country office and secured funding for relief projects. As acting desk officer for the Sudan, he helped to start emergency operations in West Darfur and as desk officer for Afghanistan, India, Kenya and Uganda he managed a protfolio of programmes, including a $3 million relief and rehabilitation programme in Afghanistan.

As a project manager in Northern Iraq, Phillip was involved in water, sanitation, nutritional and irrigation canal projects.