Featured Member: Sunday Babatunde

What are your current organizational affiliation, position and location of work?

I am based in in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and work as humanitarian civil-military coordination officer in the OCHA Liaison Office to the African Union. My task is to support the various African Union and OCHA-offices and peacekeeping training centers with civil-military coordination capacity. Also, I collaborate closely with the African stand by forces and support their activities to ensure appropriate and effective coordination with humanitarians in the field.

What was your first professional experience in humanitarian assistance? Which path led you to you current position?

I started to develop interest in this field when I was still myself a member of the peacekeeping forces. As a peacekeeper, I interacted a lot with humanitarian workers. My first major role as a peacekeeper was to provide escort to a humanitarian team and this got me interested in their work. Who has been a mentor or a guiding example to you? It was not a specific person, who inspired me, but my personal observation of humanitarian work and especially the work of the ICRC in the field.

What do you particularly love about you work, what keeps you inspired?

I love that I get to help people; including humanitarian workers and military-personnel in developing a good working relationship. This mutual understanding is critical for the facilitation of assistance to those in need. What do you experience as a professional challenge? The high turnover of players in the field is a major challenge. I have to keep on engaging with stakeholders very actively in order to get results.

Which book currently travels with you?

No particular book. However, I am currently working on a thesis on a protection-related question. Therefore I do lots of reading on this topic these days. This is also why I have a particular interest in this course on IHL/protection.

Please give a brief description of PHAP.

PHAP is a forum that helps those - who work as practitioners in humanitarian action - to follow the current policy discourse in humanitarian affairs. This is important, because in humanitarianism it is very easy to get absorbed by the day-to-day work and one can therefore easily get lost in your own particular field.