Displaying items by tag: Vulnerable groups

This guide gives essential advice and insights to humanitarian practitioners who are involved in providing safety and protecting vulnerable people in war and disaster. It provides a framework for responsibility and action which helps clarify conceptual issues and helps humanitarian field workers position themselves vis-a -vis other actors who have overlapping mandates. A practical schema is also presented which gives practical advice on how to think through the various elements of protection focused programming in four clear steps: assessment; programme design; implementation; monitoring and evaluation. The guide also outlines key principles of best practice for protection-focused humanitarian work. The book…

This guide gives essential advice and insights to humanitarian practitioners who are involved in providing safety and protecting vulnerable people in war and disaster. It provides a framework for responsibility and action which helps clarify conceptual issues and helps humanitarian field workers position themselves vis-a -vis other actors who have overlapping mandates. A practical schema is also presented which gives practical advice on how to think through the various elements of protection focused programming in four clear steps: assessment; programme design; implementation; monitoring and evaluation. The guide also outlines key principles of best practice for protection-focused humanitarian work. The book…

Mortality data, properly collected, interpreted and used, have much to contribute to the appropriateness and effectiveness of humanitarian action in emergencies, and to advocacy on behalf of populations in crises. Most actors involved in relief will one day be confronted by such data, but the different ways in which this information can be collected, and their potential pitfalls, are not yet common knowledge among non-epidemiologists. This Network Paper describes the practice and purpose of that branch of epidemiology concerned with population mortality. It sets out the key indicators used to express mortality data, different options for how to measure mortality…

Malaria kills more than a million people each year. Nearly one out of every three of these deaths occurs in an emergency setting – within populations displaced by violence, struggling to get the food, water, shelter and security they need to live, and with unpredictable access to public health services. In these conditions, vulnerability to malaria increases because people are more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes, are often ill with other infections and lack access to health care. When a humanitarian crisis occurs in a malaria-prone area, malaria deaths may exceed those resulting from other more immediate causes –…

The nature of humanitarian crises, and the parts of the world in which they frequently occur, make the management of malaria of critical and urgent importance, and systems for malaria disease management must be set up as a priority in humanitarian emergencies in malaria-endemic regions. A frequent cause of tension in an emergency can be the difference between the needs of malaria control presented by that emergency, and the needs being addressed by national malaria control mechanisms in the affected country. In a stable situation, health workers may have been trained to use clinical algorithms adapted to the level of…

In the context of a major humanitarian emergency, malaria constitutes a major public health issue, contributing to significant morbidity and mortality. The complex nature of an emergency means that many issues – such as population displacement, the breakdown of health services, lack of housing, clean water and sanitation – are liable to cause high levels of malaria, or to trigger an outright epidemic. This is particularly the case in Sub-Saharan Africa, where limited resources are available to deal with the problem, even in non-emergency settings. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that older drug regimens are failing…

The UN Security Council first considered the crisis in Darfur more than a year ago, on 2 April 2004. From the very outset, briefings to the Council characterised the events unfolding in Darfur as a crisis of protection, with large-scale atrocities and other human rights violations being at the root of the humanitarian emergency. The Council’s involvement has helped open up and maintain humanitarian access, and its referral of the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been hailed as a historic step. But the Council’s response, combined with the gradual deployment of an African Union (AU)…

The crisis in Darfur has left some 80,000 people dead, displaced over 1.6 million (nearly 30% of Darfur’s estimated six million people), and created 300,000 refugees. What makes this crisis particularly shocking is the structural character of the violence: villages have been torched, and civilians have been deliberately targeted by (aerial) bombing, summary executions, massacres and systematic rape as part of a strategy of fear instigated by the Sudanese military and the so-called Janjaweed, armed and supported by the government of Sudan. The crisis in Darfur has therefore demanded both a humanitarian and a political response. The political response has…

Since 1996, conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has claimed between 2.5 million and 3.5 million civilian lives, making the Congolese war the deadliest in the world. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a further 3.25 million refugees and internally displaced people are in need of assistance. Regular violence has decimated the population and finished off what remained of the national health, judicial, education and transport systems after three decades of misrule under President Mobutu Sese Seko. Physical violence, coercion and deprivation are common experiences for the country’s 53 million people, 31…

These Guidelines aim to help relief agencies meet the special needs of older people in emergencies. They were developed by HelpAge International in partnership with the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO). They are based on wide-ranging research from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and many years’ global disaster experience. While older people are commonly accepted as being a vulnerable group, humanitarian interventions often use systems that discriminate against them and, on occasion, undermine their capacity to support themselves. The guidelines give examples of key approaches and actions that could help the…