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.
Aid is at a critical juncture.
The coronavirus pandemic is just the latest in a series of crises that have tested the logic behind our interventions; questioned our management abilities; and interrogated whether our values are truly just and transformative.
There are renewed calls for aid to change. But it seems most of it are tweaks to an inherently broken system, instead of a real pause and reflection to the very nature of our work.
In this piece Leonie reflects on a workshop which she attended in mid-June where she spent 3 days with the IARAN fellows: a group of humanitarian professionals with expertise that spans urban planning and UK asylum law to GIS and social entrepreneurship. They discussed how each of them, in their separate organisations can bring change to the humanitarian sector, for the better.
The last century has been characterised by the advancement and spread of technology. The reach and adoption, particularly of information and communication technology (ICT) saw a sharp rise in the 1990s and has grown exponentially since. Leonie LeBorgne and Matthew Williams ask: are Aid Organisations ready to respond to a growing and dangerous digital divide?
The growth in the humanitarian sector to include private companies as partners and implementers challenges the notion that organizations working in the humanitarian sector must be driven by the humanitarian imperative alone. The inclusion of commercial firms whose fundamental purpose is to make a profit necessitates an examination of the consequences when the humanitarian imperative is but one of many motivations.
