Bob Kitchen
Director, Emergency Preparedness and Response
Languages: English
Expertise: Advocacy, Emergency Response, Humanitarian Issues, Program Management, Region: Afghanistan, Security/Protection
As the director of the IRC’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Unit, Bob Kitchen is responsible for all of the organization’s emergency and crisis intervention programs worldwide. He also manages the IRC’s 17-member Emergency Response Team, which is often among the first international humanitarian-assistance groups to arrive at the scene of a crisis.
Mr. Kitchen began working with displaced populations in 1999 in southern Albania, where he managed a program distributing food to a quarter of a million Kosovar refugees. Mr. Kitchen went on to open new relief programs in Kosovo and East Timor for Medecins Du Monde France. Upon joining the IRC as a field coordinator in 2002, he oversaw programs in Sierra Leone for refugees who had fled war-torn Liberia.
Mr. Kitchen went on to manage emergency programs in Iraq and Darfur before joining the IRC’s Emergency Response Team in 2005. He subsequently led IRC efforts to deliver humanitarian assistance to uprooted communities in Chad, Central African Republic, Indonesia, Nepal and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Before becoming the director of emergency preparedness and response, he was the country director in Afghanistan, a position he held since 2009.
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