My father, John Staley, who has died aged 88, was field director for Oxfam in south India and Sri Lanka during the late 1960s and early 70s, when he was responsible for Oxfam’s funding of several hundred local, national and international voluntary agencies.
His role included aid administration, policy formulation, project appraisal, recommendations for funding, disaster relief and liaison with government and non-government organisations. He led Oxfam’s response in India to a drought in Maharashtra in 1973, which fed more than 20,000 people as part of a work-for-food programme, and was made MBE in 1974 for services to the Indian people.
John was born in Epsom, Surrey, the only child of Robert, a doctor, and Sylvia, a housewife. He went to Marlborough college in Wiltshire, and then, after national service, to Cambridge University, where he studied natural sciences and economics (1957-61).
At Cambridge he met Elizabeth Pott, and they discovered a shared love of travelling on an overland expedition to Pakistan with friends. They married in 1962 and did PhDs together at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, studying the economics and geography of mountain communities in northern Pakistan.
In 1966 they returned to the UK, where they finished their PhDs and where John did some freelance lecturing at the Commonwealth Institute, the Pakistan Society and the Royal Central Asian Society before taking up his field director post at Oxfam in 1967.
John eventually became research director for Oxfam in India (1975-76), and during that time discovered the concept of experience-based training, by which small groups of people learn about the behaviour of groups and organisations from their own analysis of their experience of the group.
In 1976 he and some Indian colleagues founded Search, an organisation that developed and used these experience-based training methods to train people in development work in India. He was seconded by Oxfam to Search from 1976 to 1980, and then, in 1982, returned to the UK to become a lecturer and later senior lecturer in development studies at Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham – remaining there until his retirement in 1999.
Thereafter he wrote, travelled, took part in his local U3A in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, and cared for his garden and a small local wood that he and Elizabeth bought as a retirement project. Over the years John wrote three books, Words for My Brother (1982), People in Development (also 1982), and Enticing the Learning (2008).
Elizabeth died in 2019. John is survived by their children, Eleanor, Joanna and me, and grandchildren Isabelle and Freddie.
