Mary Corbett has worked in the humanitarian sector for the last 25 years. She has considerable experience in both emergency and development programming initially working in Somalia during the 92-93 crisis. Early in her career she has worked with GOAL, Oxfam and Concern Worldwide in a variety of nutrition and health programmes; developing proposals and managing programmes. She worked in the emergency department with Oxfam UK and the role included various deployments for initial emergency assessments followed on with developing programmes in some of the following countries; Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Bosnia and Pakistan.
Mary was then recruited by Concern Worldwide as the Nutrition Adviser and the role included technical support to programmes and developing policy at head office level. Her background initially was as a registered nurse, which was followed on with a course in Tropical Medicine at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and later a MSc in Nutrition & Metabolism at Aberdeen University. Between 2003 & 2013 she has worked as an independent consultant with numerous NGOs, UN agencies and donors. Organizations and UN agencies supported include ACF, British Red Cross, Save the Children, Concern Worldwide, Trocaire, UNHCR, WFP and UNICEF and donors including DFID. Her work includes numerous programme evaluations, development of technical material including national nutrition guidelines in a number of African countries, training and mentoring and conducting a number of studies.
She had a 3-year draw-down consultancy with Irish Aid giving technical support in Food Security and Nutrition. This role involved a number of country support visits, attending meetings and mapping nutrition within the organization.
She has been actively involved in the development of the approach “Community Management of Acute Malnutrition” with a specific focus on management of acute malnutrition in small children (less than 6mths). Over the last five years Mary has been working as a Nutrition Adviser on a part-time basis with Self Help Africa (Irish NGO) with a focus on integrating nutrition within agriculture and enterprise programmes to support the reduction of chronic malnutrition in countries where there is a high burden of stunting in young children. She is also currently involved in teaching in several academic institutions in Ireland. Mary has been an associate with NutirtionWorks over a number of years. She has had a number of publications with the Emergency Nutrition Network’s (ENN’s) publication “Field Exchange”.