Philippe Crahay

Philippe is a PlanAdapt Fellow based in Italy, originally from Belgium.

He is an experienced humanitarian and development professional with two decades of global advisory and field experience spanning climate adaptation and resilience, disaster risk reduction and early recovery, agrifood systems, rural livelihoods, and food and nutrition security.

During 12 years with the World Food Programme (WFP) and 6 years with Action Against Hunger (ACF), Philippe provided strategic guidance, programme design expertise, and technical and operational support to advance climate action and resilience strengthening across 20 countries. He played a key role in shaping corporate guidance, tools, and frameworks on resilience programming, community-based participatory planning, asset creation and resilient livelihoods, disaster risk management, and resilient food systems. He was instrumental in embedding resilience and climate adaptation approaches into organizational strategies – contributing to WFP’s new resilience policy, endorsed by the Executive Board in November 2024, and to ACF’s frameworks on climate resilience and disaster risk management.

Working closely with country office teams and partners across Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, he led and guided the design and institutionalization of context-specific, multi-sectoral resilience strategies and programmes. He fostered collaborative partnerships, strengthened national and local capacities, and championed participatory, people-centred approaches that empower vulnerable farmers, groups, and communities to define and lead their own resilience pathways. His country experience includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Nepal, Niger, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Sudan.

At WFP, Philippe served as a lead technical reviewer for country strategic plans and a series of evaluations addressing resilience, targeting, and displacement contexts. He oversaw cost-benefit analyses of livelihood support programmes and documented country-level lessons and best practices in resilience and climate action. At ACF, he led livelihoods, food and nutrition security assessments in Indonesia, Nepal, Afghanistan and Sudan. He also managed the ‘Changing climates, changing lives’ applied research initiative and led a multi-sectoral analysis of climate change’s impacts on undernutrition.

Between 2009 and 2011, Philippe played a pioneering role in bridging the nutrition and climate change agendas, advancing multi-sectoral analysis, policy recommendations, and advocacy efforts aimed at global nutrition and climate communities.

He is an agricultural engineer specializing in land and environmental management, trained at Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech (Université de Liège, Belgium). He also holds a MSc in tropical forestry, with a focus on community forestry, from Wageningen University & Research (The Netherlands).