Mark Calder is a British advocacy specialist with a PhD in Social Anthropology. He has worked on Afghanistan for World Vision since December 2021 and joined World Vision Afghanistan in January 2024. He is committed to representing Afghanistan’s complexity with due attention to the interests and experiences of its diverse communities, telling fuller, more nuanced stories that highlight the collective effort behind lasting change. 

With a research background in the Middle East, Mark has a keen interest in understanding how the local contexts in which humanitarian and development interventions unfold affect those interventions’ success or failure. Having previously worked for an NGO working entirely through local partners, and having researched the ways in which NGOs can positively or negatively affect social cohesion in the context of conflict, Mark is committed to a vision of localisation that takes the time properly to understand what empowering local actors means in a given context. This informed his leadership of the UK NGO sector’s conflict prevention submission to the 2023 International Development Strategy, while working as a conflict specialist for World Vision UK. 

Mark says, “Despite the well-known challenges in Afghanistan, there is enormous scope to support Afghans to change their circumstances through properly contextualised and holistic humanitarian and development work.”

Previously, Mark taught Social Science Research Methods in the Study of Religion at Durham University in the UK, where he conducted postdoctoral research on civil society peacebuilding in Syria and the predicament of youth in the eastern Mediterranean region.