CHALLENGES TO PRACTISING DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANISATIONS (INGOS)

Over the past year, Children in Crossfire (CiC) has been involved in a strategic planning process to focus the overall work of the organisation, from the international context to local fundraising campaigns. During this process, the development education team recognised that it had not adequately collaborated with the fundraising and international departments, and had been operating within a 'silo culture'. They identified an opportunity to reflect as an organisation, and to reconsider the approach to development education to ensure it is 'rooted in and informed by the overseas development programme...and to seek coherence across the work of CiC through ongoing coordination among the development education, fundraising and international teams' (Children in Crossfire, 2010:1). In this article, Helen Henderson and Grainne O'Neill, two development educators working in Children in Crossfire, examine the importance and benefits of working collaboratively across departments within INGOs and the relevance for development education specifically.