Hugh Salmon is the Director of the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance (GSSWA), leading a range of initiatives at global, regional, and national levels focused on assessing and strengthening the social service workforce. He champions sustained investment in the workforce to ensure its effectiveness across various contexts, including child protection, social protection, health, justice, and education services, as well as disaster risk reduction and climate resilience.
Hugh qualified and practised as a social worker in England in the 1990s. Since 2000, he has been training and advising social service staff and volunteers, as well as managers and policymakers, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. More recently, he has worked across a range of countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
From 2012 to 2018, he was part of the leadership team that established Family for Every Child as a new global alliance of local civil society organizations committed to reforming and improving children’s care worldwide. Hugh has also worked as a consultant, helping to develop family-based alternative care services in several countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
In India, the work Hugh has led for GSSWA has included, in partnership with UNICEF and national consultants, the assessment and mapping of the child protection workforce in five states in Northeast India during 2021 and 2022. This also involved the development of a training-of-trainers program on case management, as well as a mapping of the justice for children workforce across South Asia.
More recently, he has led a global initiative, in partnership with Martin James Foundation and Child Frontiers, to explore how to strengthen training and advocacy for the social service workforce by drawing on the lived experience of youth and families. In India, this initiative was implemented with Miracle Foundation India as the national partner.
Hugh holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge (1992), and master’s degrees in Social Work from Goldsmiths, University of London (1995), and in Civil Society Management from London South Bank University (2012).