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Birkbeck alumna awarded MBE for services to development in Helmand Province

Cleo Blackman works for Department for International Development

Cleo Blackman (pictured right), who graduated from Birkbeck's MSc Development Studies in 2011, was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list for services to Development in Helmand Province.

Cleo, who was Deputy Head of Socio-Economic Development and then Strategy Advisor for the Department for International Development, spent nearly two years representing the UK in Helmand’s Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) where she managed projects including road building, rehabilitating clinics and schools, providing vocational training to Afghan men and women, ensuring the work was sustainable and good value for money. As Strategy Adviser she also worked on lessons learned from the civil-military mission, gathering data from seven years of multinational work across strategy and planning, infrastructure, rule of law, health, education and economic development. Working in the Helmand PRT during the planned transition to Afghan security forces meant working closely alongside the military, local implementing partners, the UN and the provincial government, with a strong focus on ensuring local partners had the necessary capacity to maintain and develop the projects when international forces completely withdraw from Afghanistan in December 2014, marking the end of a 13-year presence. The Helmand PRT closed its doors in March 2014.

Cleo said: "Studying at Birkbeck gave me solid grounding in a wide range of development theories and concepts that helped me improve existing projects, close poor performing projects and design new ones. It helped me put the theories into practice and have confidence in the advice I gave to colleagues and partners. Having that background understanding is vital to working closely with partner governments because everything you do is basically knowledge transfer and building capacity of those who hold the futures of developing countries in their hands. I came away with a really strong understanding that building knowledge capacity is some of the most important work we do as aid workers; without it, no amount of aid spending can be truly effective in the long-term. In particular, studying at Birkbeck gave me the chance to study in detail the effect of civil-military working on aid in Helmand (for my dissertation) – a subject which proved invaluable when I came to work on lessons learned as Strategy Adviser in 2013 because I had a degree of understanding of the context and it was really interesting reviewing the same subject from the inside, from a different perspective.”

Dr Jasmine Gideon, programme director of the MSc Development Studies said: "We are all delighted for Cleo and really proud of her success. Hopefully her achievements will inspire others to pursue their career goals. It is always good to know that students are able to build on their time at Birkbeck and that their qualifications are more than just a mark of academic success.”

Cleo is now working in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on a three-year assignment developing a new action research programme that aims to test whether economic empowerment of adolescent girls is an effective entry-point for broader empowerment. The programme more broadly supports building the evidence base on women and girls in DRC – from social norms affecting their empowerment, to the links between economic empowerment and sexual and gender-based violence – and using that evidence to improve the way gender is mainstreamed in development programming. “Again – another job that studying International Development at Birkbeck prepared me for through its excellent modules on gender and war and conflict,” comments Cleo.

Careers using Birkbeck's postgraduate development studies courses

Find out how other MSc Development alumni are using their qualification in their careers in this short video

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