Development director

Olivier Consolo on how a background in French agriculture and aid work in Latin America led him to the development network Concord.

When Olivier Consolo emerged from university, he knew where he was heading: into the French agri-business. He had been “educated and trained for that” at university in Lille and in three extended internships, in South Africa, Mexico and Latin America. There, his appreciation deepened for family-based farming, farming that in France “looked to values, while being very modern”.

He found himself a job at the French farmers’ union. By then, two seeds of his current work – as director of Concord, the Confederation for Relief and Development, representing 1,800 development NGOs – had been planted. Already strongly pro-European, he was “impressed that the EU had dared to put in place measures to compensate for the handicaps” faced by the farmers in mountainous regions with whom he worked. And in Latin America, he had seen – with dismay – the impact of the international food industry.

After a spell of civilian service, he realised he should “follow [his] intuition to enter development work”. He turned to Minitel, the French internet of the day, and found himself a job as the ‘country co-ordinator’ for Guatemala for Enfants Réfugiés du Monde, leading a network offering psychological, educational and healthcare support during the country’s long-running civil war. To give the post to a 26-year-old was perhaps brave, but the head of the organisation later said that Consolo had the passion, cultural sensitivity, and generalist attitude essential to the post.

It was a “formative experience”, not just affecting his attitudes but also adding skills. It was like a small business, Consolo says: he had to be aware of every aspect of the operation.

Grassroots work

In 1994, after two years, family pressures and visions of job security led him back to France, “against my inner instinct”. But the NGO experience that, he was told, might have been valued in the Anglo-Saxon world, cut little ice in France. After two years of trying to break into marketing, he told himself “stop: go back to what you want to do”. For three years, he worked at the grassroots for development NGOs in France, and raised awareness of the potential of l’autre mondialisation, or alternative globalisation.

After-hours, Consolo was drawing up a business plan to set up his own alternative-tourism project in Guatemala. But when he returned to Guatemala, he was offered a job by the United Nations, to encourage local participation. “It seems I have kept trying to get back to the private sector, and then always found something pulling me back” to the development world, he says.

After a year with the UN, he joined the European Commission’s delegation in Guatemala, working on a pilot project on ‘joint programming’, to determine how the EU’s money should be spread. Those three years were “incredible”, the “most exciting” of his career, he says of the experience of bringing together business, government, local civil society and international groups to plan support for the country’s post-war reconstruction.

The war ended in 1996, but for a family, the environment was never fully secure, and in 2003 he moved to Brussels to become Concord’s first director – a position he won partly because he had worked in roles ranging from volunteer to treasurer and board member. For an organisation whose 22 national associations have 1,800 members, it was more important to have “a strong sense of the building blocks of the sector” than to have a Brussels profile.

Indeed, Consolo, who is now 46, says his main work is “deepening the capacity of the members, of the building blocks, to engage in EU advocacy and politics”, because “European engagement is almost never spontaneously a priority”.

Generating and promoting ideas is another cornerstone of his work. The NGO sector is very good at coming up with ideas, he says; “its problem is scaling up”. At the EU level, he sees part of his role influencing how the EU adjusts to its declining profile in aid and development. He is watching with concern how the EU is trying to compete as a donor, “aligning itself downwards” with China. “We try to give it confidence that there is an alternative.”

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