Humanitarian crises are growing in complexity and impact. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs nearly 300 million people globally needed humanitarian assistance and protection in 2024. In a world plagued by natural disasters, violent conflict, and public health emergencies, humanitarian service delivery is critical.
Among the countries worst affected from the sudden and wide-ranging US aid cuts is South Sudan. South Sudan relies on international assistance to provide basic services to its people. Cuts will devastate its healthcare system, including its ability to prepare for and respond to infectious disease outbreaks.
In the last thirty years, humanitarian programmes have increasingly sought to preserve not only physical life and health, but also to address psychological needs and promote social well-being. This growing prioritisation of psychological issues in humanitarian settings can be seen in the development of new types of assistance efforts, described by the umbrella term “mental health and psychosocial” (MHPSS). However, mental health and psychosocial programmes have been widely criticised, and the MHPSS field marked by intense debate.In this paper, the author defines international therapeutic governance and describes research by Vanessa Pupava onpsychosocial programming as being homogenising, pathologising, controlling and depoliticising. Assimilating and synthesising Pupavac’s critique, the paper creates a four-fold evaluative framework and then analyses its critical utility.
It goes on to to analyse current practice as represented by the 2007 IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support.The author argues that practitioners have made significant progress in moving toward a culturally-appropriate and empowering model of psychosocial programming within humanitarian interventions,
Correspondence on continued poor integration of social sciences during global health crises.
In 2008, a BBC World Service Trust policy briefing argued that people affected by earthquakes, floods or other emergencies often lacked the information they needed to survive and that this only added to their stress and anxiety. Left in the Dark: the unmet need for information in humanitarian emergencies maintained that humanitarian agencies were increasingly effective and coordinated in getting food, water, shelter and medical help to people affected by disasters, but were neglecting the need to get often life-saving information to them.
Unquestionably, the biggest single change in the communications sector since the 2008 Left in the Dark paper has been the explosion in access to communications technology among communities affected by disaster. As a result, this is the focus of this paper.
Andrew Seal and Rob Bailey discuss the limitations of data-driven humanitarian efforts, and the lessons learned from the 2011 Somalia famine.
Where there is no kit and no infrastructure, there is vulnerability.
Peter Redfield explores the role of medical humanitarian response in the Ebola crisis.
This report gives the findings of field research, secondary data analysis and detailed interrogation of humanitarian emergencies, and proposes six broad clusters of potential threats.
Using the principles of reputational case selection sampling procedure and thematic search of electronic databases and websites, we implemented a regional synthesis of evidence on the health vulnerabilities of migrant and mobile populations in urban areas of East and Southern Africa. The review identified key health challenges relating to various diseases, including the increasing challenge of non-communicable diseases, such diabetes among migrants by 2030.
While figures are difficult to obtain, our review suggested high levels of urban migrants, including refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and asylum seekers in urban areas of the region, which for undocumented migrants poses particular logistics challenges in terms of administering targeted interventions, more so in contexts where poor socio-economic situations of countries do not provide them with opportunities to become self-reliant and less dependent on humanitarian assistance. This calls for policies, program interventions and research investments targeting vulnerable migrant and mobile groups in the region.
This article provides results from an online survey of humanitarian workers and volunteers that was conducted in May and June 2010. The purpose of the survey was to understand how the humanitarian aid system adopts or incorporates human rights into its post-natural disaster work and metrics. Data collected from Haiti suggest that humanitarians have embraced a rights-based approach but that they do not agree about how this is defined or about what standards and indicators can be considered rights-based. This disagreement may reveal that humanitarians are aware of a mismatch between the rights-based approach to post-disaster humanitarian work and the legal framework of human rights.
Using participation and accountability as examples, this article identifies and examines this mismatch and suggests that the humanitarian aid system should more fully embrace engagement with the human rights framework. To do so, the article concludes,
