Last year a convoy of employees and consultants for Chemonics was ambushed and murdered in Afghanistan, one of the worst incidents of violence in the field of international development. The year before a young woman who was a Presidential Management Fellow at USAID was shot in the eye in Sudan while on a routine mission.
Blackwater, one of the biggest contractors working in Iraq, reports more than 100 attacks and murders of its staff. Although a lack of systematic data collection means estimates on the number of aid workers and consultants killed in Iraq and Afghanistan must be culled from news reports, there is little doubt that development professionals are working in some of the most dangerous areas of the world.
Yet recruiters are able to find people to go to the field. Young professionals hoping to begin a career are queuing up to be included in the pool of qualified professionals from which international aid and development organizations draw. And though finding senior level management has proven more challenging because there are fewer experienced professionals but high demand. How do recruiters for development and humanitarian relief organizations manage to recruit talented professionals for positions in the most inhospitable places, where war, violence, famine, and natural disasters are just part of a day’s work?