[56] When delivering humanitarian aid, it is thus important for humanitarian actors, such as the United Nations, to include challenges specific to women in their humanitarian response. Resource transfers may feed into, prolong and worsen conflict in the following ways: 1. There is growing agreement among the organisations that aid and development are more an issue of emphasis than two absolutely separate activities. Development co-operation entails many activities, for example: technological support, rural development, livelihood support projects and the like, which may have only an indirect impact on conflict. [24][25] The constitutive conference of this committee in October 1863 created the statutory foundation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in their resolutions regarding national societies, caring for the wounded, their symbol, and most importantly the indispensable neutrality of ambulances, hospitals, medical personnel and the wounded themselves. [44] However, evidence has shown how cash transfers can be better for recipients as it gives them choice and control, they can be more cost-efficient and better for local markets and economies. %PDF-1.6 % International Review of the Red Cross 94 (2013): 1311. (23), 6. Four of the most widely known initiatives are, ALNAP, the CHS Alliance, the Sphere Project and the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS). The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross. Artificial intelligence algorithms may instantaneously assess flooding, building and road damage based on satellite images and weather forecasts, allowing rescuers to distribute emergency aid more effectively and identify those still in danger and isolated from escape routes. It was approved by the CHS Technical Advisory Group in 2014, and has since been endorsed by many humanitarian actors such as "the Boards of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP), People in Aid and the Sphere Project". 0000004631 00000 n ), Ethiopia: A Country Study, U.S. aid chief to travel to Ethiopia in diplomatic push on Tigray. [67], Aid workers are exposed to tough conditions and have to be flexible, resilient, and responsible in an environment that humans are not psychologically supposed to deal with, in such severe conditions that trauma is common. (3): See Anderson 1996, especially p. 16 ff., Donini 1996, de Waal/Omaar 1996. Market effects: Aid affects prices, wages and profits, and can either reinforce the war economy (enriching activities and people that are war-related) or the peace economy (reinforcing normal civilian production, consumption and exchange).(28). [47] In the arena of negotiations, humanitarian diplomacy is ostensibly used by humanitarian actors to try to persuade decision makers and leaders to act, at all times and in all circumstances, in the interest of vulnerable people and with full respect for fundamental humanitarian principles. [22] Dunant took these ideas and came up with two more ingenious concepts that would profoundly alter the practice of war; first Dunant envisioned a creation of permanent volunteer relief societies, much like the ad hoc relief group he coordinated in Solferino, to assist wounded soldiers; next Dunant began an effort to call for the adoption of a treaty which would guarantee the protection of wounded soldiers and any who attempted to come to their aid. "[60] Furthermore, analyzing the relationship between conflict and food aid, a recent research shows that the United States' food aid promoted civil conflict in recipient countries on average. [2] Humanitarian aid can come from either local or international communities. International/intergovernmental agencies such as the UN agencies (e.g. There can be different arrangements on the role these agencies play, and such arrangement affects that quality of hard and soft aid delivered. Dossier: This is not only never correct but reinforces existing stereotypes and thereby warfare. [28], The first of the renowned Geneva Conventions was signed on 22 August 1864; never before in history has a treaty so greatly impacted how warring parties engage with one another. International Review of the Red Cross 94 (2013):1325, Bugnion, Francois. Resist the pressure to spend aid rapidly. [12][13] In 1854, when the Crimean War began[14] Florence Nightingale and her team of 38 nurses arrived to Barracks Hospital of Scutari where there were thousands of sick and wounded soldiers. AJe'/Q0X@. The challenge for humanitarian aid is to plan and carry out its missions so as to avoid these negative by-products. Caritas or Catholic Relief Services in the Catholic Church); 4. Aid can be seized by armed groups, and even if it does reach the intended recipients, "it is difficult to exclude local members of local militia group from being direct recipients if they are also malnourished and qualify to receive aid. (24), 7. [62], However, there is little clear consensus on the trade-offs between speed and control, especially in emergency situations when the humanitarian imperative of saving lives and alleviating suffering may conflict with the time and resources required to minimise corruption risks. The countries deemed least safe were Somalia and Afghanistan. 0000128078 00000 n Humanitarian relief efforts are provided for humanitarian purposes and include natural disasters and man-made disasters. See Schwieger 2000. (6): A comparative study of the relationship between development co-operation and conflict in six countries has shown that development projects may increase conflict potential as well as decrease it. women specific challenges are listed and sex and age disaggregated data are used so when they deliver aid to a country facing a humanitarian crisis, girls and women can have access to the aid they need. ", "The Sphere Project | New online course on the Core Humanitarian Standard | News", The Humanitarian Organisations Dataset (HOD), "Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance", "The Code of Conduct: humanitarian principles in practice", "EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database", "Protection work during armed conflict and other situations of violence: professional standards", "The Center for Disaster and Humanitarian Assistance Medicine", "Post-Modern Conflict and Humanitarian Action: Questioning the Paradigm", "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis", International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Weeks, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Humanitarian_aid&oldid=1099685394, All articles with bare URLs for citations, Articles with bare URLs for citations from March 2022, Articles with PDF format bare URLs for citations, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2020, Pages using Sister project links with hidden wikidata, Pages using Sister project links with default search, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. [29] The basic tenents of the convention outlined the neutrality of medical services, including hospitals, ambulances, and related personnel, the requirement to care for and protect the sick and wounded during the conflict and something of particular symbolic importance to the International Committee of the Red Cross: the Red Cross emblem. Early attempts were in private hands and were limited in their financial and organizational capabilities. Publicity: Finally, when NGO headquarters makes use of pictures of atrocities in order to raise funds, they may reinforce the demonisation of one side in a war and, thus, reinforce the sense that one side is evil and the other good. The Sphere Project handbook, Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response], which was produced by a coalition of leading non-governmental humanitarian agencies, lists the following principles of humanitarian action: Another humanitarian standard used is the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS). (33): See Roche 1999 for some published examples. In effect these NGOs are the civil arm of their governments policies and the ideological cousins of the IMF and World Bank. Although the authorities have been criticized for their laissez-faire attitude during the famine, relief measures were introduced towards the end. 0000001988 00000 n Women have limited access to paid work, are at risk of child marriage, and are more exposed to Gender based violence, such as rape and domestic abuse. The significance only grew with time in the revision and adaptation of the Geneva Convention in 1906, 1929 and 1949; additionally, supplementary treaties granted protection to hospital ships, prisoners of war and most importantly to civilians in wartime. 0000001711 00000 n AIDR uses human and machine intelligence to automatically tag up to thousands of messages per minute so humanitarian organizations are able to take faster decisions depending on the trends from the data collected during a specific kind emergency. An increase in United States' wheat aid increased the duration of armed civil conflicts in recipient countries, and ethnic polarization heightened this effect. Representatives of these initiatives began meeting together on a regular basis in 2003 in order to share common issues and harmonise activities where possible.[75]. (29), The implicit ethical messages conveyed through aid may include: carrying the message of acceptance of the terms of war by negotiating passage with warring parties or hiring armed guards to protect the delivery; bestowing legitimacy on warriors and undermining peace-time values (when, for example, it becomes obvious that the aid organisation values the life of its own international staff higher than that of local people); and reinforcing animosity by making atrocities committed in the course of the war public in their fundraising campaigns. In the case of humanitarian aid, the discussion centres mainly on the negative and positive impacts which humanitarian aid may have as a by-product of conflicts. As many as 10 million people may have died in the famine. The German Dienste in bersee (Services Overseas), for example, accompanied a threatened bishop in Guatemala. Aid workers are the people distributed internationally to do humanitarian aid work. Forsythe, David. Support of judicial system, e.g. [52], The recent rise in Big Data, high-resolution satellite imagery and new platforms powered by advanced computing have already prompted the development of crisis mapping to help humanitarian organizations make sense of the vast volume and velocity of information generated during disasters. <<01B6D42AF36DE649A779CD2A9D957AEA>]>>

In some cases, development organisations have also engaged in peacekeeping activities. International Review of the Red Cross 94 (2013): 1324, Bugnion, Francois. see Central Emergency Response Fund). Though a significant amount of work is under way to develop software and algorithms for verifying crowdsourced or anonymously provided data, such tools are not yet operational or widely available. [1], Humanitarian aid is seen as "a fundamental expression of the universal value of solidarity between people and a moral imperative". [77] Most notably, it has replaced the core standards of the Sphere Handbook[78] and it is regularly referred to and supported by officials from the United Nations, the EU, various NGOs and institutes. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15. See Gass/van Dok 2000:56, and also Diringer 2001:19. Save the Children Fund began after WW I and the Russian civil war. It recommends agencies to collect data disaggregated by sex and age to better understand which group of the population is in need of what type of aid. (31) Issues include that development projects: have cemented local inequities instead of alleviating poverty; have fostered conflicts over resources instead of protecting them; have supported authoritarian regimes; have called cultural values into question; and have created and inflated an NGO market, where NGOs are being founded only to reserve donations from abroad. These activities can be found in most of the work descriptions of development agencies - e.g. "Birth of an Idea: The Founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross and of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement: From Solferino to the Original Geneva Convention (18591864)." Impunity: When aid workers use the goods and support systems provided as aid to people who suffer for their own pleasures and purposes (such as taking a vehicle to the mountains for a weekend holiday - even when petrol is scarce), the message is that if one has control over resources, it is permissible to use them for personal benefit without being accountable to anyone else who may have a claim on these resources. In addition to the older ICRC, Save the Children Fund, Oxfam, etc., new organisations (11) were founded in the 1970s and 1980s, many due the impact of the Biafra war 1967-1971 (12). Composed of five Geneva citizens, this committee endorsed Dunant's vision to legally neutralize medical personnel responding to wounded soldiers. "Birth of an Idea: The Founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross and of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement: From Solferino to the Original Geneva Convention (18591864)." (See Web site of NRC: www.nrc.no/NRC/nrc.htm. While some critics were questioning whether the sector will truly benefit from the implementation of yet another humanitarian standard, others have praised it for its simplicity. (14): See Humanitarian Charter 2000:9 f. (16): Even those based only in one country, like the German Dienste in bersee, have more then 260 development workers in the field. 0000128306 00000 n Another fairly typical service offered by development agencies as well as by the Civil Peace Services is trauma counselling for children and refugees. Mdecins sans Frontires; Oxfam), NGOs based in one country (e.g. The first global summit on humanitarian diplomacy was held in 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey. [citation needed], Big data for humanitarian operations provides a unique opportunity to access instantaneously contextual information about pending and ongoing humanitarian crises. The need for aid is ever-increasing and has long outstripped the financial resources available. Also, multiple data transactions and increased complexity in data structures raise the potential for error in humanitarian data entry and interpretation, and this raises concerns about the accuracy and representativeness of data that is used for policy decisions in highly pressurized situations that demand quick decision-making.[52]. Development aid has long been accused of cultural hegemonialism. [73], 2021 reporting on a Racial Equity Index report indicated that just under two-thirds of aid workers have experienced racism and 98% of survey respondents witnessed racism. Often in disaster situations, international aid agencies work in hand with local agencies. support of independent journalism, of cultural activities (e.g. [16] Nightingale and her team established a kitchen, laundry and increased hygiene. He is the General Secretary of the Pan-African movement.). "[61] Thus, the impact of humanitarian aid on conflict may vary depending upon the type and mode in which aid is received, and, inter alia, the local socio-economic, cultural, historical, geographical and political conditions in the recipient countries. (7), There are many lessons to be learned from humanitarian aid and development work, concerning mainly the Do No Harm approach and other issues of impact by presence in the field; the question of partiality and impartiality; and several issues concerning organisational structures (8) and activities, e.g. 0000007032 00000 n [32], Another such examples occurred in response to the Northern Chinese Famine of 18761879, brought about by a drought that began in northern China in 1875 and led to crop failures in the following years. Some of the most powerful NGOs get the vast majority of their money from their own governments, whether from emergency operations or for development projects. (Diringer 2001:18). In addition to post-conflict settings, a large portion of aid is often directed at countries currently undergoing conflicts. The total number of humanitarian aid workers around the world has been calculated by ALNAP, a network of agencies working in the Humanitarian System, as 210,800 in 2008. 326 0 obj<>stream 0000004357 00000 n in the not yet published and not-quotable case studies of the Reflecting on Peace Practices-Project, the interviews I conducted with representatives of development agencies and different other publications, e.g. Understanding Uncertainty. (29): When humanitarian aid satisfies basic needs, then the political elites are free of their responsibility, and need no longer justify their actions to civil society. Actors like the affected people themselves, civil society, local informal first-responders, civil society, the diaspora, businesses, local governments, military, local and international non-governmental organizations all play a crucial role in a timely delivery of humanitarian aid. ; and the Code of Conduct of International Alert (which is really a conflict transformation, not a development organisation). Joseph H. Choate. i "4I00iXEVL7/8y3s z International Review of the Red Cross 94 (2013): 1300. mcconnell fleet Support of civil society, including election monitoring, education of voters, support of national conferences, support of NGOs working on conflict resolution, support of human rights organisations, support of ethnically or socially marginalised groups to articulate their interests; 4. [74], The humanitarian community has initiated a number of interagency initiatives to improve accountability, quality and performance in humanitarian action. The 198385 famine in Ethiopia caused upwards of 1 million deaths and was documented by a BBC news crew, with Michael Buerk describing "a biblical famine in the 20th Century" and "the closest thing to hell on Earth". The four UN entities that have primary roles in delivering humanitarian aid are United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme (WFP). UNV serves as an operational partner in developmental, humanitarian and peace operations at the request of any UN member state or UN system agency. For example, it has been estimated that over $8.75billion was lost to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. On the other hand, aid that is given across subgroups can serve to lessen the division between groups. Festival Images migrantes "Du migrant au sujet politique", Pourquoi as-tu quitt ton pays? [36], Live Aid, a 1985 fund-raising effort headed by Bob Geldof induced millions of people in the West to donate money and to urge their governments to participate in the relief effort in Ethiopia. international snippits haiti profit organization crescent cross qatar culture club federation snappits Nightingale used principles of new science and statistics to measure progress and plan for her hospital. [16] Typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery were common in the army hospitals. [50] The approach also encompasses humanitarian transportation, the goal of which is to ensure migrants and refugees retain access to basic goods/services and the labor market. The primary objective of humanitarian aid is to save lives, alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17. Traditionally, humanitarian organizations have concentrated their efforts in the delivery of human, medical, food, shelter and water sanitation and hygiene resources during humanitarian emergencies. [8], The beginnings of organized international humanitarian aid can be traced to the late 19th century. Forsythe, David. 0000128652 00000 n The majority of aid is provided in the form of in-kind goods or assistance, with cash and vouchers constituting only 6% of total humanitarian spending. Waste and corruption are hard to quantify, in part because they are often a taboo subject, but they appear to be significant in humanitarian aid. (12): Also the older organisations were usually founded under the impression of a specific war. To this field belongs the support of traditional mechanisms of dealing with conflict, of NGO networks and peace constituencies, education and independent media. (24): Services Overseas in Mexico and Mozambique. Hosein Karimi, Negin Masoudi Alavi. The embryonic formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross had begun to take shape in 1863 when the private Geneva Society of Public Welfare created a permanent sub-committee called "The International Committee for Aid to Wounded in Situations of War". ; and the four Geneva conventions of 1949. [44], It is important to note that humanitarian aid is not only delivered through aid workers sent by bilateral, multilateral or intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations. Perhaps one third of the projects in which UNV places its volunteers are projects carried out by international organisations (mostly UN-organisations), and almost two thirds of them work in the UNVs own projects. (27) According to this approach there are two ways by which aid may affect conflict: first, through resource transfers and, second, through implicit ethical messages. There is a debate on linking humanitarian aid and development efforts, which was reinforced by the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. Many humanitarian and development organisations have developed codes of conduct (20) which outline principles of approach as well as more pragmatic dos and donts. In addition, there are various other types of organisations that do not deal with emergency aid at all. Oxfam and CARE were founded after WW II. Larger lessons-learned projects such as Reflecting on Peace Processes by the same group of organisations which developed the Do No Harm approach, or the comparable project by the European Platform on Conflict Prevention, are still under way and have yet to publish their results. Distributional effects: Aid is usually targeted to certain groups which means that other people do not receive it, thereby tending to reinforce the conflict, especially if one of the groups is identifiable with pre-formed sides in the conflict.

See Slim 1997:123. (31): Some critics of humanitarian aid do not content themselves with criticising negative by-products but question the legitimacy of humanitarian aid as a whole. Once she returned to Great Britain she campaigned for the founding of the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army. Continue to invest in audit capacity, beyond simple paper trails; Establish and verify the effectiveness of complaints mechanisms, paying close attention to local power structures, security and cultural factors hindering complaints; Clearly explain the processes during the targeting and registration stages, highlighting points such as the fact that people should not make payments to be included, photocopy and read aloud any lists prepared by leaders or committees.