Two years of huge emergency after huge emergency - from the Covid-19 pandemic’s various variants to evacuations from Afghanistan and a series of storms battering the UK - our people are tired, yet the need for humanitarian aid continues to grow. And then the Ukraine crisis boiled over.
We have always struggled to plan for the many uncertainties the future may bring, but the massive disruptions of the last couple of years made us realise that grappling with uncertainty is not an option.
The British Red Cross’s Strategic Insight and Foresight team has been developing a way to rapidly construct scenarios about the future, helping our teams get a sense of likely people’s short-term and longer-term humanitarian needs, as well as the potential ripple effects caused by a crisis.
Whilst multilateral reform and changing the current models of humanitarian financing are ultimately what is needed for systemic change, every agency could adjust the way that it develops programmes- and this small change has the potential to transform aid. Designing and delivering aid programs is a core function of most humanitarian organizations and therefore it is in the process that all humanitarian aid sectors needs to revisit to begin their equity-based, decolonial journey.
