Cassie Dummett, née Knight, is a writer, researcher and senior manager of international development programmes. She lives in London with her family after many years overseas, in Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, India and Bangladesh. She wrote Brazzaville Charms after living and working in Congo-Brazzaville in 2001-3.
Cassie Dummett is lead co-author of Illicit Harvest, Complicit Goods, a set of reports that analyses how much tropical deforestation is driven by commercial agriculture and how much is illegal. The rate of illegal deforestation for commercial agriculture is rising across the tropics: 4.5 million hectares a year is illegally converted from forest to commercial agriculture. Cassie conducted an extensive review of all evidence in 23 countries and identified that 69% of tropical forest destruction for agricultural commodities happens illegally. The reports are the culmination of over a year’s research that used deforestation data from Global Forest Watch and UN global trade data to trace the role of consumer countries in buying the commodities grown on illegally deforested land. Illicit Harvest, Complicit Goods is published by Forest Trends in May 2021.
Cassie is an enthusiast of rewilding as a way of restoring natural processes, sequestering carbon and protecting biodiversity. She is doing an MSc in Conservation at University College London and is volunteering for the National Plant Monitoring Survey in North Norfolk. She is a seasonal ecologist for Eight Associates, helping out on bat surveys and ecology surveys in London and East Anglia.
Cassie led large scale emergency response programmes in Congo, DRC, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and The Philippines. Working for Catholic Relief Services from 2001-2014 she responded to conflict and displacement, food insecurity, cyclones, floods, earthquakes and typhoons. In 2014 she led the agency’s response to the super typhoon Haiyan, which caused devastation on the islands of Leyte and Samar in The Philippines. With colleagues and teams of youth volunteers from the affected areas, she organised the distribution of shelter kits to 30,000 families in three weeks, working round the clock and sleeping in tents in a displaced people’s camp, because so few buildings were left intact.
Cassie has authored guidance and good practice documents for international development, for example, A How-To Guide for Community Based Disaster Preparedness in India and Participatory Assessment Guidance, published by Catholic Relief Services, one of America’s largest NGOs.
This practical experience of humanitarian response made her a strong advocate of Sphere standards, the voluntary minimum standards which provide benchmark for assistance and protection in emergencies. Cassie is a Sphere trainer, worked as Coordinator of the Humanitarian Standards Partnership, launched the HSP app, participated in the revision of the 2019 Sphere handbook.
Cassie has experience conducting evaluations in Africa and South Asia (e.g. Team Leader of the Final Evaluation of International Rescue Committee’s Multi-Sector Refugee Programme for Congolese refugees in Betou, Republic of Congo, Real Time Evaluation of the Caritas Internationalis Rohingya Crisis Response). She has trained staff on monitoring and evaluation in emergencies, set up monitoring and evaluation systems for programmes and has facilitated learning reviews. She was a Subject Matter Expert for the MEAL in Emergencies e-learning course, a popular module on disasterready.org.
Cassie led the development of CAFOD’s Safe Accessible Dignified and Inclusive programming framework which brings together accountability, protection mainstreaming, inclusion and safeguarding into a single programme approach. She supported national NGOs and CAFOD partners in Niger, Central African Republic and Cambodia to strengthen their safeguarding and protection in programmes. She presented it at the ALNAP Annual Meeting roundtable in Berlin, 2019.
Cassie has an academic training in social anthropology and did her thesis on oral history and national identities in the Eritrean highlands. Her anthropology background has informed her approach to international development, with a focus on participatory methods and facilitation of multi-stakeholder processes. Cassie’s career has been centred around working with local organisations and supporting them to scale up their programmes. In all her work, and in her voluntary work in London, Cassie is an advocate for social justice and the environment.
Brazzaville Charms is written under her maiden name, Cassie Knight, while her professional career has since been under her married name, Cassie Dummett.
Cassie Dummett, née Knight, is an experienced manager in international development and humanitarian response. She lives in London with her family after many years overseas, in Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, India and Bangladesh.
Brazzaville Charms gives a rare insight into the history and culture of the Republic of Congo. It is a first-person account of what it was like to live there, backed up by research into its history and politics, and told through interviews with Congolese people whose stories come alive through its pages.
