Biography

Roger Riddell is a development specialist with 35 years' experience and has been a Non-Executive Director of OPM since 2004. From 2008 to the end of 2010, he was a member of DFID's Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact, where he led the committee's study on the quality of evaluation. From 1999 to 2004, Roger was the International Director of Christian Aid, one of the UK's largest relief and development agencies. Roger led Christian Aid's international development, relief and policy teams and the agency's expansion into central Asia and has worked extensively in conflict countries such as Afghanistan, the Palestine Occupied Territories and Sierra Leone. From 1984 to 1999, Roger was a Senior Research Fellow at ODI, where he published work on aid, NGOs, manufacturing, mining and regional integration and was responsible for leading research and consultancy teams for many bilateral and multinational aid agencies. In 1980, he was appointed Chair of the first post-independent Economic Commission in Zimbabwe, whose report on  'Prices, Income and Conditions of Service'  was published by the Government of Zimbabwe in 1981. Roger conducted the first poverty studies in urban Zimbabwe in the early 1970s and from 1981 to 1983 he was Chief Economist for the Confederation of Zimbabwean Industries. Roger has written and lectured extensively on foreign aid issues. His book Foreign Aid Reconsidered was published in 1998 and this has been followed by his more recent publication Does Foreign Aid Really Work?,  published in paperback by Oxford University Press in 2008. Also in 2008, he was the lead author of the OPM study  'Assessing and Measuring the Impact of Aid: Evidence, Challenges and Ways Forward', which was commissioned and published by the Advisory Board on Irish Aid. In late 2010, his study on  'Poverty, Disability and Aid'  was published as a chapter in the Leonard Cheshire Disability book Poverty and Disability. Roger gave the King's Lecture in Ethics at King's College, University of London on the  'Ethical challenges in providing aid to poor countries in 2008'. This was published as  'Aiding the World’s Poor'  in the Oxford University Press publication Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy in the spring of 2011. Since 2010, Roger has been a member of the Consortium Advisory Group on a three-year DFID-funded cross-cutting disability research programme.