”I help where I’m needed”

SILKE VON BROCKHAUSEN

Member of UNDP staff

Crises are her job. For six years, Silke von Brockhausen has been working for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Her desk is really at the UN headquarters in New York, but she’s been getting around quite a lot recently. She spent two months in the South Pacific island nations Vanuatu and Tuvalu following the devastating Cyclone Pam, three months in Sierra Leone on account of the Ebola epidemic and two months in Jordan because of the conflict in Yemen – those are just some of her recent exciting deployments. The 34-year-old German is one of the UNDP staff members who have pledged to be ready to go within 48 hours whenever there’s an emergency somewhere in the world.

It was a voluntary and wholly conscious decision on the part of the trained economist, who initially worked for the international organisation for a number of years in Bonn. And she took it because she believes that it is “in times of crisis that the United Nations is needed most”. Theoretically, she could turn down such requests, but so far that’s something she hasn’t even considered. “There would have to be a 
really good reason. I’ve pledged to help wherever I’m needed – and I mean it.”

As a communication specialist at UNDP, her deployments are nearly always about crisis communication, about information she relays from the respective country to the rest of the world – and vice versa. In the wake of Cyclone Pam, for example, she reported on the devastation, describing how people dealt with the new situation and explaining what sort of help would be most meaningful. In Sierra Leone, she assisted the head of the UN mission there and came to realise that Ebola made her “feel pretty uncomfortable”, too. But despite some of the hardships that working for UNDP entails, she believes her job is “incredibly meaningful and enriching”. At present, Silke von Brockhausen can’t imagine working anywhere other than at the United Nations. ▪