Charlie Higgins was born in the United Kingdom in 1965.  He studied history (MA with honours, 1988) at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 

After a short commission serving as an officer with the Royal Engineers (1989-1995), he commenced his humanitarian career in 1995, working first with the Overseas Development Administration (now the Department for International Development).  As a member of the ODA Emergency Response Team he helped to manage the UK Government’s first line of emergency response capacity, through the provision of logistic support to official British overseas aid.  The main emergency operations he was involved with were the provision of relief convoys to communities across Croatia and Bosnia, and water supply to refugees in Goma, Eastern Zaire, who had fled Rwanda after the genocide, in support of the UN missions in these conflict zones. 

In 1996 he joined the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs (now the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – OCHA) to work as training manager of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team.  Aside from the many courses for disaster managers from different countries and regions that he ran in this capacity, he has been on a number of UNDAC missions.  These included a mission to Rwanda and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) following the refoulment of the Rwandan refugees in 1996, and more recently to Sri Lanka to facilitate the production of a Joint UN and Government Strategy to meet the immediate needs of returning Internally Displaced Persons, following the ceasefire between the Government and the Tamil Tigers.

He came to the Pacific as the OCHA Regional Disaster Response Adviser – a new post – in 1999, although his experience of the region dates back to 1991 when he led a team of Gurkha Engineers from Hong Kong to Samoa to rebuild a hospital severely damaged by Tropical Cyclone Val.  Most of his work over the last four years has concentrated on natural disaster response and capacity-building at national level, but he was involved in the assessment of humanitarian needs of the population displaced by the ethnic conflict in Solomon Islands and in subsequent activities.