Parker, Ben

Ben Parker is the director of IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks), an award-winning specialist news and analysis service on humanitarian issues. He has been working in media, information and humanitarian issues since 1989. He has worked mainly for UN agencies in Africa, but also as a freelance writer and technology consultant. From the early 1990s, he became involved in setting up some of the first e-mail systems in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Kenya. In 1995 he was the co-founder of IRIN, which covers issues and parts of the world often under-reported, misunderstood or ignored. He set up the initial editorial and online systems for IRIN, and later moved into web publishing in the private sector with Africa Online. As a UN communications officer in Sudan from 2003-2006, he was closely involved in raising the alarm about Darfur internationally and released some of the first widely-available photos and TV footage of the crisis. After a brief stint at the European Commission, he returned to IRIN in 2006 as its global Editor-in-Chief and since 2009, its director.