The 2022 Pakistan Floods are a climate change disaster. Getting the governance of disaster and crisis management right is critical for relief, rehabilitation, and recovery and to prepare for future climate emergencies. This SSHAP brief highlight 5 actions to tackle bottlenecks and enable effective interventions.
The Sphere Humanitarian Charter states that: All people should have access to health services that are prioritised to address the main causes of excess mortality and morbidity. There are a number of handbooks to aid prioritisation in crisis situations (highlighted in section 2 of this report):The Johns Hopkins and Red Cross Red Crescent public health guide outlines essential tasks for prioritising health services and shows a simple technique for ranking health problems in emergencies.The Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN) guide proposes questions for identifying health problems for prioritisation and a framework for answering these.
The UNICEF Emergency Field Handbook gives a priority action checklist.The WHO Health and Nutrition Tracking Service (HNTS) highlights priority indicators for assessing the nutritional and general health situation in complex emergencies. Medecins Sans Frontieres list intervention priorities for refugee health for the emergency and post-emergency phase of a situation.Further resources,
More must be done to ensure the needs and rights of people with disabilities are fully recognised in disaster risk reduction and emergency responses. Accelerating progress will require inclusive humanitarian programming and the use of technological solutions to be effectively promoted and incentivised, and people with disabilities and their organisations to be involved from the outset in the design and implementation of policies and programmes.
This Rapid Response briefing argues that It is important to follow a twin-track approach, having both accessible mainstream responses as well as dedicated responses for specific needs. Donors could also make the inclusion of people with disabilities a mandatory component of response funding or earmark funding for disability. More work is also required to make field staff in humanitarian responses aware of disabled people’s needs and of the resources available for them. As crises have demonstrated,
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,
Andrew Seal and Rob Bailey discuss the limitations of data-driven humanitarian efforts, and the lessons learned from the 2011 Somalia famine.
Access to essential medications, such as insulin, must be improved and the impact of NCD preventive activities and preparedness for crisis further addressed.
Although this seems an insurmountable task, the impressive progress that has been made in the management of communicable diseases demonstrates that large-scale change is achievable with global collaboration, research and advocacy. Therefore, let us face this new frontier in global health with courage to establish feasible and effective interventions in order to improve humanitarian action and join international efforts to prevent, control and ultimately reduce the burden of NCDs, in particular in the world’s most vulnerable populations.
The humanitarian impact of the 2015-2016 El Niño remains deeply alarming, now affecting over 60 million people. Central America, East Africa (particularly Ethiopia), the Pacific and Southern Africa remain the most affected regions.
The El Niño phenomenon is now in decline, but projections indicate the situation will worsen throughout at least the end of the year, with food insecurity
caused primarily by drought not likely to peak before December. Therefore, the humanitarian impacts will last well into 2017.
About 125 million people are affected by crises. A quarter of those people are female and of reproductive age – and women are 14 times more likely than men to die in a crisis.
Being caught in a humanitarian crisis with a disability can lead to abandonment and neglect. How can we make humanitarian response more inclusive?
hen the shooting started Simplice Lenguy told his wife to take their children and run. It was 5 December 2013, and the war in Central African Republic (CAR) had arrived on his doorstep. “I couldn’t go fast with my canes and I didn’t want them to wait for me,” says Simplice. “All our friends and relatives had already fled in fear.”
This document uses lessons learned from recent coordinated assessments to distil key points,advice, and pitfalls in carrying out a Coordinated Assessment during the first weeks of a disaster. It provides a general introduction to what has been learned about coordinated assessments in terms of what works and what does not.
As such, it is aimed towards humanitarian personnel responding to or preparing for emergencies both at field and headquarters level.
This Technical Brief is for assessment experts, information management officers and information analysts planning or implementing assessments in emergency contexts. It provides guidance on how to select and use suitable methods when conducting a population estimation exercise.This technical brief builds upon the desk review Rapid estimation of affected population figures, which has identified and detailed a broad range of different population estimation methods.
These methods are categorised by sampling methods, site estimation methods,counting methods, remote estimation methods and the usage of existing demographic data. It is recommended to use the above mentioned review as a reference for more in-depth information about the different techniques described in the present document. The present technical brief should be considered as a companion to the review.
The purpose of this technical brief is to assist humanitarian workers in using secondary demographic data in emergencies. It recommends building a context specific demographic profile based on available information. It proposes some rule-of-thumb standards, which can be adapted to the local context, tailoring to the purpose and the time available.
The document provides: 1. Long term guidance sheets (if you have a few days): identifying demographic ‘mega trends’, and possible interactions with disaster risk, impact and response. This broader perspective is essential for interpreting data in emergencies, and as input for longer term strategy (e.g. CAP orSRP) 2. Short term quick start (if you have an hour):accessing demographic data for immediate operational needs in a specific emergency,such as input in a flash appeal (e.g. within24-48 hours).Clearly, this supplements, rather than replaces,the need for primary data, but is intended to be helpful in preparing for large scale primary data collection,