Supporting Humanitarian Efforts During Crises

Supporting Humanitarian Efforts

When a crisis hits, you can support humanitarian efforts to save lives and create a more resilient future. Humanitarian aid donations preserve life and provide critical supplies, professional care and hope.

They can also protect education, since schools are safe places for children to receive essential services. And they help ensure that water crises are addressed with funds for systems and filters to meet immediate needs.

Food

CARE is working to reach the world’s hungriest people. Your gift can help make a difference.

As the number and length of conflict-driven humanitarian crises grows, blanket aid is no longer sustainable (Aid International 2021). Instead, we need to support local markets, integrate food into relief operations, and focus on prevention and peacebuilding.

Humanitarian aid has a long and controversial history. The 1984 televised images of starving children in Korem, Ethiopia and the 1985 Live Aid concert helped raise awareness and money for humanitarian aid (HA)—as its application improved, the concept was increasingly defined through principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.

However, a recent study suggests that the use of HA is often marred by corruption, de-facto state influence, and a lack of accountability, particularly in protracted crisis settings. Further, some HA approaches may be fueling or sustainting conflict in these settings. Consequently, the associate administrator who leads the new BHA family of bureaus should develop a joint strategy to build resilience and advance recovery in protracted crises.

Water

A reliable water supply is a vital prerequisite for life, enabling health, education and economic productivity. Yet more than 700 children under the age of five die each day from diarrhoea caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation.

The ICRC helps people living in conflict zones enjoy safe access to water, while also creating or maintaining a sustainable living environment. In this way, we reduce suffering and death due to damaged or disrupted water supplies.

Our work on water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) is based on respect for international humanitarian law. The law prohibits harming the natural environment, including water sources, and protects objects indispensable to civilian survival. It is also critical to involve local communities in WASH programming. For example, a project funded by Roche in Mali helped improve the supply of clean drinking water to some 630,000 people. This included constructing and upgrading water supply systems, providing chlorine for treatment of drinking water, and promoting hygiene in the community.

Sanitation

In emergency situations like droughts, floods or conflict the ability to get clean water is vital to survival. Humanitarian organizations mobilize quickly and can deploy within hours to start helping people with the basics. They also educate local communities how to prepare for an emergency so they can be more self-sufficient in the future.

A focus on sanitation helps prevent the spread of diseases and reduces vulnerability to epidemic outbreaks. Providing sanitation services means ensuring access to toilets (preferably gender-segregated), latrines and showers; proper waste management and disposal systems (including solid and faecal sludge); and good hygiene practices like handwashing and menstrual hygiene.

Especially for women, children and refugees, a lack of safe water and adequate sanitation increases their vulnerability to disease and poverty. This is why these groups are a priority for many humanitarian groups.

Agriculture

Agriculture is at the heart of humanitarian response and needs to be fully integrated into all emergency interventions. It is the primary source of food and income in crisis-affected communities, significantly cutting other costs of humanitarian intervention and helping to sustain livelihoods after a crisis has ended.

Humanitarian actors should ensure that agricultural projects meet local market requirements, use available resources and be scalable beyond localized pilots. This will help prevent ‘white elephants’ that do not meet their intended outcomes (e.g. not adapted to local conditions, insufficiently financed and not able to be implemented at scale).

Agriculture is also an essential economic sector for women. Women face challenges in accessing paid work, are more exposed to gender based violence and are less resilient during crises. This is why it is important that gender is fully considered in all humanitarian responses. Humanitarian agencies should be collecting data disaggregated by sex and age to identify specific needs of women.

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