Antonio Díaz, COMUS, El Salvador © Vanessa Kurz/ Progressio

Progressio works with partner organisations in 11 countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our way of working is to combine skill-share with advocacy. With our partner organisations we identify areas where the input of a development worker might lead to real change. We then recruit people for these jobs.

Progressio development workers are people who want to share their skills with communities that need them. Each development worker is professionally qualified with a minimum of two years' work experience, and often with a background in training — formal or informal. 

In sharing their skills with partner organisations, our development workers aim also to improve the ability of our partners to advocate for change locally and nationally. At an international level, we support and supplement the voices of our partners in seeking to change the systems and practices that create and perpetuate poverty in the global South.

In 2004/5, we had 83 development workers in post. They came from 30 different countries - 40 per cent from the global North (North America and Europe), and 60 per cent from the global South (the rest of the world).

'When one lives in a poor community in a developing country, it is so easy to feel forgotten by the outside world. Thank you for showing us that this is not so. Thank you for showing us that people care about us.'
- Antonio Díaz, a founder member of Progressio partner organisation COMUS in El Salvador.

Of 11 development workers in Nicaragua, for example, four were European (from the UK, Belgium and Spain) and seven were Latin American (from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Honduras). In Somaliland, our eight development workers were from six different nationalities: Canadian, Ethiopian, Filipino, Irish, Somali and Zimbabwean.

This multicultural diversity represents a real global exchange of skills and experience - an exchange that is based on shared values and global solidarity.

'I believe that one can replant oneself in another place and be fed by other waters and other sunshines and come to life once again.' - John Bayron Ochoa, a Progressio development worker in El Salvador.