You can contact us either by email or send us a voicemail to 0041.22.534.96.84 in Geneva. We will get back to you quickly to discuss your needs and questions and how we may help.
Marco Kirschbaum
Executive director
Marco has worked on human rights and humanitarian issues since 1986. As a student, he worked with Amnesty International, mainly for the protection of refugees and detainees. After an MA in Chinese studies in Berlin in 1991, Marco started working for the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), first in Sri Lanka, then in the Philippines, Djibouti and Israel as a delegate, head of mission and coordinator. At the ICRC's HQ in Geneva, he served as head of sector for Protection for the Middle East from 1998-2003, and for Asia from 2003-2007. Since 2008, he is working full-time for the NGO Management Association.
To improve the results and impact of civil society organisations, it is necessary to enhance knowledge on management and leadership, to share practical skills and tools and to develop new strategies. To this purpose, he and Daniel D'Esposito set up the website NGO Manager in 2001. NGO Manager provides NGOs with a selection of the best management tools and key articles for NGOs which are available on the internet free of charge.
To further enhance management capacity-building opportunities for NGOs, Marco, Roberto and Rita established the NGO Management School (NMS) in 2006. The purpose of the School is provide high-quality management training for a fair price to participants from NGOs in the North and in the South close to where they live and work.
Both NGO Manager and the NGO Management School were set up as volunteer endeavours. They are services by the NGO Management Association, an nonprofit association founded in 2001 in Switzerland. Marco is its executive director. He is based in the Geneva area in Switzerland.
Maria Normita Palo Training Co-Director
Rita has fifteen years of experience as a senior executive in NGOs, as a trainer and consultant for NGOs, for cooperatives, communities, local government units, donor agencies and for small businesses. She has carried out assignments in the Philippines, Chittagong and Rangamati in Bangladesh and in Suva, Fiji for national NGOs, as well as for Misereor, Bread for the World, GTZ, USAID, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Rita is a former executive director of the Settlement and Livelihoods Foundation in the Philippines and was a university instructor of accounting in Davao City, the Philippines. She is the author of several financial and operations manuals for NGOs. Based in Davao City, the Philippines, Rita is the co-founder and an associate of InterDev Consulting.
Her areas of expertise are:
Development of management courses, providing training courses on financial management, micro-finance projects, marketing and human resource management
Specialist in training and coaching of trainers, international trainer for GTZ-CEFE Network Foundation
Consultancy on financial management, micro-finance and local governance
Development, installation and operationalization of system manuals for NGOs.
Roberto Palo Training Co-Director
Roberto has more than 20 years of experience as a communication professional and senior trainer for NGOs, cooperatives, communities, for local government units, donor agencies and small businesses. He has carried out assignments in the Philippines, Afghanistan, Australia, Malaysia and Fiji for the ICRC, GTZ, Bread for the World, the Australian Red Cross, the Japan Social Development Fund, The World Bank and the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. After starting his career as a coordinator for theatre and radio productions, Roberto was the ICRC's communications and field officer in Mindanao, the Philippines, for several years. He developed and conducted numerous Red Cross and humanitarian law-related training courses in the Philippines and in other countries. Roberto is based in Davao City, the Philippines and is the co-founder and an associate of InterDev Consulting.
His areas of expertise are:
Training design and curriculum development of management courses for NGOs, financial management, marketing, business plans and negotiation
Conducting of training courses, training of trainers, senior trainer for CEFE Network Foundation
Conducting of programme and project monitoring, evaluation and assessments for development and humanitarian work
Development and installation of system manuals for NGOs and self-help organizations
Consultancy on financial management, social marketing, organizational assessment and capacity building.
Pierre Dyens
Treasurer
Pierre Dyens is human resources manager at the
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. Before that he was the administrator of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies and programme manager for the
Master of Advanced Studies programme at the same Institute.
Pierre worked several years with MSF Switzerland as
mission administrator in Nicaragua and the
Philippines, then as human resources manager at its Swiss
headquarters.
After studying social and political sciences, he
studied for an Executive Diploma at the Swiss Graduate
School of Public Administration (IDHEAP).
Pierre is the NMS treasurer.
Tham Thi Hong Phuong
NMS Vietnam Representative
Phuong has 13 years of experience working for international organisations in Vietnam. She is a specialist in communications and capacity building. Phuong worked as national coordinator, project manager and project officer for WWF, IUCN and UNICEF. She now is the national programme coordinator for a multi-donor capacity building programme in the environmental sector. Previously, Phuong worked for a Swiss-Vietnamese programme, also in the environment sector; was the national communication and training coordinator for a joint programme by IUCN-UNDP-Mekong River Commission (MRC) and worked as communications officer for UNICEF and WWF.
In 2007, she graduated with a M.A. from the International Master of Advance Study Program (IMAS) on international development, a joint program of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (IUED) of the University of Geneva and the Asian Institute of Technology Center in Viet Nam (AITCV). She also has university degrees in informatics and mathematics.
Phuong's areas of expertise are:
Developing communications strategies;
Developing training courses on communication skills, development of information - education - communication materials and the effectiveness of using communication materials.
Phuong is the Vietnam representative of NMS.
Lydia Canaljia
Senior Trainer and Consultant
Lydia Canalija has 15 years of experience as trainer and consultant in management of nonprofit organisations. Lydia is specialised in project development, strategic planning, financial management and in cooperatives. She is on the board of directors of the Visayas Central Fund Federation in the Philippines. She is an associate of NMS and is based in Davao, the Philippines.
Catherine Marie G. Martin
Senior Trainer and Consultant
Catherine has 17 years of experience working with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. For the Philippine National Red Cross, she was field manager, disaster management specialist, trainer and International Humanitarian Law disseminator. At its National Headquarters, she was Human Resources Management and Development Manager and thereafter Director for HR and Administration. She had also worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross on secondment.
She was the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies' (IFRC) Movement Coordinator for the relief efforts to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. Previously, she was the Movement Coordinator for the Tsunami Recovery Operations at the IFCR's international HQ in Geneva, Switzerland, and later on in Indonesia. Catherine worked extensively in the Tsunami affected areas in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand and the Maldives, and among the donor societies of Australia, Canada and the USA until late 2007.
Her areas of expertise are:
Organizational Diagnosis and Development
Human Resources Management and Development
Training design and curriculum development of management courses for humanitarian and development workers
Change Management
Community Organizing
Programme Monitoring and Evaluation
Partnership Management and Development
Catherine holds a post graduate diploma from NALSAR University of Law Proximate Education in Hyderabad, India, and diploma from CHIC and Fordham University in New York City. She is currently finalizing her thesis for a Masters Degree in MS Development in the University of Southeastern Philippines in Davao City.
Katherine Owen
Senior Trainer and Consultant
Katherine has worked the last 15 years with Development Agencies, Foundations and NGOs on cross-cutting issues such as governance, organizational development and capacity building. She has worked extensively on thematic issues such as child rights, child labour, trafficking and labour migration and has carried out extensive field work in West Africa and the Caribbean.
Katherine worked as a programme officer in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Haiti for the International Cocoa Initiative, USAID/Winrock International, UNDP/UNOPS and as a senior consultant for IUCN, UNHCR, the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, the Government of Ivory Coast and the World Cocoa Foundation.
In her various functions, she designed various programmes with training components for government representatives, decentralized authorities and civil society on project design, planning and management, monitoring and evaluation, facilitation of participatory planning at local level, surveys, child rights and child labour, human rights and electoral processes.
Katherine is an anthropologist with a Master's degree in development studies from Geneva's Graduate Institute of Development Studies. She has published on environmental issues and carried out research on child labour migration and trafficking.
She is commission member of several Swiss NGOs and NGO federations. Katherine speaks fluently French, English and Creole.
Joy Delgra
Senior Trainer and Consultant
Joy has 15 years of experience in development work. For eight years, she was the Mindanao head of the Social Development Management Institute, the training arm of the Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), one of the largest non-profit organizations in the Philippines. Moving on, she chaired the Psychology Program and was a professor at the Davao Doctors College. Recently, she was in charge of the Education Development Center/USAID's community support programme in the Philippines.
Her area of expertise lies in:
Capacity building of community stakeholders, specifically on curriculum development,
Course design development and pilot testing,
Manual development,
Training management and facilitation,
Organizational capacity assessment,
Tool development,
Training systems assessment and installation,
Development and management of institution building programmes
Counseling in the workplace.
Joy has developed several manuals on team building, strategic planning, organizational capacity assessment, community organizing and marine protected area management planning. She has designed tools used in research, end of program assessment, training faculty assessment and for recruitment and selection.
Simone Lutz
Head of Project
Simone lived for two years in Honduras where she did voluntary work with adolescent street children. She has a B.A. degree in Science of Education (Adult Education) at works at the Geneva's Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.
During her studies, she worked on certification procedures and did a traineeship at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies to evaluate the effectiveness of training programmes.
Simone now works as a volunteer on the certification of NMS as a part-time head of project.
Thi-Huyen Nguyen
Assistant
Nguyen Thi Huyen studies at the Geneva University's Graduate Institute of Development Studies for an M.A. degree in development studies. Huyen has a B.A. degree in International Relations. She worked as a liaison officer for foreign diplomats for the Vietnam General Assembly and the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs when she was a student at home. She now works as a part-time intern with us in Geneva.
Daniel Laux
Assistant
Daniel Laux studies for an M.A. degree in development studies at the Geneva University's Graduate Institute of Development Studies. Daniel has first studied social work at the University of Applied Sciences of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He has worked as a social worker and teacher for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioural difficulties and with asylum seekers. Besides his studies, he is a social worker for employees of COOP, a large retailer in Switzerland. Daniel works part-time as an intern with NMS in Geneva.
Daniel D'Esposito
Webmaster
Daniel has ten years experience in protection working with the ICRC. After field missions in Iraq, Israel and occupied territories, Bosnia, he worked for at ICRC headquarters' Protection Division in Geneva as researcher, field support officer and head of its Protection training unit.
He obtained a Masters in NGO Management at the London School of Economics in 1999/2000.
Since January 2006, he has been working as training officer at a great little human rights NGO called HURIDOCS, based in Versoix, which helps other human rights organisations improve their capacity to monitor respect for human rights and document violations. In 2006, Daniel founded the website Human Rights Tools to provide human rights activitists with easy access to the best reference material for their work.
Daniel is based in Coppet in the Geneva area, Switzerland.
