International development charity Emergency Nutrition Network has announced the appointment of its first chief executive, after more than 25 years without a boss.
Nigel Tricks will join the charity in September, having spent more than 30 years working with international aid agencies in Africa and Asia.
Founded in 1996, ENN works with programmers, policy-makers and researchers with the aim of building an evidence base on how to overcome malnutrition.
It has spent between £1.2m and £1.3m in each of the past five years, according to the latest filings with the Charity Commission.
Until now, the charity has been run by a team of peers working collectively.
Tricks will join from the Norwegian Refugee Council, where he has been regional director for East Africa and Yemen for the past four years.
He said: “I am familiar with ENN’s extraordinary reputation and the huge respect all stakeholders have for it.
“I am excited and humbled to take up this role as its first chief executive. I look forward to working with the team to build strategies that enable us to support those at the frontline in the battle against malnutrition.
“I’m also looking forward to representing this creative and productive organisation in a time of huge challenge for the global nutrition sector, the wider humanitarian community, and for those facing the overlapping crises of conflict, climate shocks and Covid-19.”
Marie McGrath, technical director of ENN, who has helped run the charity since 2004, told Third Sector: “As the global nutrition challenges have increased in complexity, the demand for ENN continues to escalate.
“We felt the time was right to secure a dedicated chief executive to help us step up, to facilitate our next strategic phase to identify where we can best add value, help us build on our strengths and improve our reach, and to free our senior technical team from the day-to-day oversight of operations to concentrate on our nutrition work portfolio.
“We wanted to secure a seasoned senior executive, with his head and heart firmly in operational realities of international development, to help us to deliver on this – we are so lucky to have secured Nigel Tricks to join us for the next phase of ENN.”
Graham MacKay, chair of trustees at ENN, said Tricks would bring “an empowering leadership style” to the charity.