Hi, my name’s Malcolm Marks and I’ve been asked to kick off the CLP blog! I arrived in Bangladesh in early 2007 to fill the vacant IML Director position at the Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP) and, a couple of years later, moved into the team leader slot; a job that’s kept me busy since 2009. Working at the CLP and living in Bangladesh generally has been a great experience; but it has been a long and interesting road to get here. I received my PhD in Ecology from London University when I was 26 and had always wanted to work overseas. Partly, I guess, this is because I married a French woman, Veronique, and overseas’ living took us on to neutral territory! So I started my overseas career in 1979 as a lecturer in Ecology at the new university of Calabar in S.E. Nigeria. It turned out that I was the first ecology lecturer employed by the university and so my initial role was to sort out a new and quite disorganised (more diplomatically, “becoming organised”) unit. I was quickly pulled into various management roles that I hadn’t expected; for example, I began running the botanical gardens and supervising a PhD student very early on – I was barely a few months older than him!

That experience set a bit of a pattern for the next few years. I love research and writing, and so continued in the university environment while increasingly being offered short-term consulting assignments in Africa. But then, literally out of the blue in 1989, I was offered the role of technical advisor in ecology for a UN project in Senegal. This was my first long-term development project; and I was thrown in the deep-end. Not only was the work language French but within a couple of weeks of arriving in country, the chief technical advisor (equivalent to team leader) announced that he had a World Bank assignment and left. So the UN asked me to step into that role, and the rest, as they say, is history. Actually, it rather set a trend because my next post was in Gambia, on a USAID-funded project, and I was subsequently invited to become team leader there and then ditto for a DFID-funded project in Botswana! So, I haven’t necessarily sought out team leadership or senior management roles but often they have landed on me when I wasn’t expecting them.

Indeed this happened to me at the CLP. I actually came for a short-term consultancy at the end of 2006 and was offered the vacant Innovation, Monitoring and Learning (IML) role and later the team leader position. These roles have proven to be the most satisfying work experience of my career.

Although I really enjoyed my time as director IML, the team leader role brought a host of different challenges and experiences. I guess my main role is to delegate lots of difficult work to my team members and then check that it’s done to the right standards! But being able to work with excellent team members, donors and company colleagues to develop strategies that allow us to achieve our vision of what the programme should be doing, then watch it being implemented and improved over time, is one of the most satisfying aspects of the job. Liaising closely with our donors and sponsors is also very rewarding. CLP has excellent relations with DFID and AusAID as well as with RDCD (the Rural Development & Cooperative Division, the Bangladeshi Government Department that sponsors the CLP). I’m proud that my team and I do everything we can to maintain this relationship; it’s vital to the continued good performance of the programme. I feel exceptionally proud of the CLP team. It really is the best team that I’ve had the pleasure of working with during a long career.

Although I really enjoyed my time as director IML, the team leader role brought a host of different challenges and experiences. I guess my main role is to delegate lots of difficult work to my team members and then check that it’s done to the right standards! But being able to work with excellent team members, donors and company colleagues to develop strategies that allow us to achieve our vision of what the programme should be doing, then watch it being implemented and improved over time, is one of the most satisfying aspects of the job. Liaising closely with our donors and sponsors is also very rewarding. CLP has excellent relations with DFID and AusAID as well as with RDCD (the Rural Development & Cooperative Division, the Bangladeshi Government Department that sponsors the CLP). I’m proud that my team and I do everything we can to maintain this relationship; it’s vital to the continued good performance of the programme. I feel exceptionally proud of the CLP team. It really is the best team that I’ve had the pleasure of working with during a long career.

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