Tommy Garnett has a background in Agricultural and Development Economics. Following post graduate studies in the former USSR, he began his career in 1984, as a high school teacher in Kenya, where he taught Agriculture, Mathematics and Physical Education for 4 years. In 1992, one year after the onset of civil conflict in his home country Sierra Leone, Mr. Garnett founded the Environmental Foundation for Africa as a charity in the UK, to create awareness about the environmental impacts of the conflict and the unregulated and destructive mineral mining industry which fuelled the conflict, and to empower the local people to protect the integrity of nature. In 1995 Mr. Garnett moved back to Sierra Leone where he set up a pilot program of land reclamation and reforestation until 1997, when the deteriorating security situation made further work impossible. Mr. Garnett moved to Liberia in 1997 and established a country program of the Environmental Foundation for Africa there, to address the environmental impacts of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the internally displaced in Liberia. From 1998 Mr. Garnett traveled extensively in the West Africa sub-region studying and reporting on the nature and extent of the threats to the Upper Guinea Forest Ecosystem. Mr Garnett is currently the regional director of programs of the Environment Foundation for Africa and is a member of the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication. From 2006-2012 he was West and Central Africa Regional Vice Chair of this commission. In 2003-2007, Tommy was a member of the UN Panel of Experts monitoring economic sanctions on Liberia, with the specific task of assessing the socio-economic and humanitarian impacts of the sanctions, producing several reports to the UN Security Council during this time.
Tommy Garnett
