![Distribution of BP-5 Emergency food packages in Goma - from Flickr 2995064256](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Distribution_of_BP-5_Emergency_food_packages_in_Goma_-_from_Flickr_2995064256.jpg)
Humanitarian aid is material and
logistic assistance to people who need help. It is usually short-term help until the long-term help by the government and other institutions replaces it. Among the people in need are the
homeless,
refugee
A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution. s, and victims of
natural disaster
A natural disaster is "the negative impact following an actual occurrence of natural hazard in the event that it significantly harms a community". A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property, and typically leaves some econ ...
s, wars, and famines. Humanitarian relief efforts are provided for
humanitarian
Humanitarianism is an active belief in the value of human life, whereby humans practice benevolent treatment and provide assistance to other humans to reduce suffering and improve the conditions of humanity for moral, altruistic, and emotional ...
purposes and include
natural disasters
A natural disaster is "the negative impact following an actual occurrence of natural hazard in the event that it significantly harms a community". A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property, and typically leaves some econo ...
and
man-made disaster
Anthropogenic hazards are hazards caused by human action or inaction. They are contrasted with natural hazards. Anthropogenic hazards may adversely affect humans, other organisms, biomes, and ecosystems. They can even cause an omnicide. The fre ...
s. The primary objective of humanitarian aid is to save lives, alleviate
suffering, and maintain
human dignity
Dignity is the right of a person to be valued and respected for their own sake, and to be treated ethically. It is of significance in morality, ethics, law and politics as an extension of the Enlightenment-era concepts of inherent, inalienable ...
. It may, therefore, be distinguished from
development aid
Development aid is a type of foreign/international/overseas aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social, and political development of developing countries. Closely-related concepts include: develop ...
, which seeks to address the underlying
socioeconomic
Socioeconomics (also known as social economics) is the social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. In general it analyzes how modern societies progress, stagnate, or regress because of their l ...
factors which may have led to a crisis or emergency. There is a debate on linking humanitarian aid and development efforts, which was reinforced by the
World Humanitarian Summit
The United Nations World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) was held in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 23 and 24, 2016. The summit was an initiative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon and was organized by the United Nations Office for the ...
in 2016. However, the conflation is viewed critically by practitioners.
Humanitarian aid is seen as "a fundamental expression of the universal value of solidarity between people and a moral imperative". Humanitarian aid can come from either local or international communities. In reaching out to international communities, the
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is a United Nations (UN) body established in December 1991 by the General Assembly to strengthen the international response to complex emergencies and natural disaster ...
(OCHA) of the
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...
(UN) is responsible for coordination responses to emergencies. It taps to the various members of
Inter-Agency Standing Committee The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) is an inter-agency forum of United Nations and non-UN humanitarian partners founded in 1991 to strengthen humanitarian assistance. The overall objective of the IASC is to improve the delivery of humanitaria ...
, whose members are responsible for providing emergency relief. The four UN entities that have primary roles in delivering humanitarian aid are
United Nations Development Programme
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)french: Programme des Nations unies pour le développement, PNUD is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human dev ...
(UNDP), the
United Nations Refugee Agency
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integratio ...
(UNHCR), the
United Nations Children's Fund
UNICEF (), originally called the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund in full, now officially United Nations Children's Fund, is an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to ...
(UNICEF) and the
World Food Programme
The World Food Programme; it, Programma alimentare mondiale; es, Programa Mundial de Alimentos; ar, برنامج الأغذية العالمي, translit=barnamaj al'aghdhiat alealami; russian: Всемирная продовольствен� ...
(WFP).
![US Navy 100125-N-6266K-238 A Red Cross worker picks up a humanitarian box to give to an earthquake survivor in Port-au-Prince](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/US_Navy_100125-N-6266K-238_A_Red_Cross_worker_picks_up_a_humanitarian_box_to_give_to_an_earthquake_survivor_in_Port-au-Prince.jpg)
The
International Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC; french: Comité international de la Croix-Rouge) is a humanitarian organization which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and it is also a three-time Nobel Prize Laureate. State parties (signato ...
understands humanitarian relief as a norm in both international and non-international armed conflicts, and countries or war parties that prevent humanitarian relief are generally widely criticized.
[ICRC IHL dababase]
Rule 55. Access for Humanitarian Relief to Civilians in Need
According to
The Overseas Development Institute
ODI (formerly the 'Overseas Development Institute') is a global affairs think tank, founded in 1960. Its mission is "to inspire people to act on injustice and inequality through collaborative research and ideas that matter for people and the p ...
, a London-based research establishment, whose findings were released in April 2009 in the paper "Providing aid in insecure environments: 2009 Update", the most lethal year for aid providers in the history of
humanitarianism
Humanitarianism is an active belief in the value of human life, whereby humans practice benevolent treatment and provide assistance to other humans to reduce suffering and improve the conditions of humanity for moral, altruistic, and emotional ...
was 2008, in which 122 aid workers were murdered and 260 assaulted. The countries deemed least safe were
Somalia
Somalia, , Osmanya script: 𐒈𐒝𐒑𐒛𐒐𐒘𐒕𐒖; ar, الصومال, aṣ-Ṣūmāl officially the Federal Republic of SomaliaThe ''Federal Republic of Somalia'' is the country's name per Article 1 of thProvisional Constituti ...
and
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...
. In 2014, Humanitarian Outcomes reported that the countries with the highest incidents were: Afghanistan,
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...
, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Kenya.
According to the ''
Global Humanitarian Overview
''Global Humanitarian Overview'' is an annual report published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
It documents how many people have unmet humanitarian needs and the funding that is needed by humanitarian ag ...
'' of OCHA, 274 million people need humanitarian assistance and
protection
Protection is any measure taken to guard a thing against damage caused by outside forces. Protection can be provided to physical objects, including organisms, to systems, and to intangible things like civil and political rights. Although th ...
in 2022, or 1 out of 29 people worldwide.
History
Origins
![Henry Dunant-young](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Henry_Dunant-young.jpg)
The beginnings of organized international humanitarian aid can be traced to the late 19th century. Early campaigns include British aid to distressed populations on the continent and in Sweden during the Napoleonic Wars, and the international relief campaigns during the Great Irish Famine in the 1840s.
In 1854, when the Crimean War began
[Hosein Karimi, Negin Masoudi Alavi. Florence Nightingale: The Mother of Nursing. Nurs Midwifery Stud. 2015 Jun;4(2)] Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale (; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was an English Reform movement, social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during t ...
and her team of 38 nurses arrived to Barracks Hospital of Scutari where there were thousands of sick and wounded soldiers.
[Joseph H. Choate. What Florence Nightingale Did for Mankind. Am J Nurs. 1911 Feb;11(5):346–57.] Nightingale and her team watched as the understaffed military hospitals struggled to maintain hygienic conditions and meet the needs of patients.
Ten times more soldiers were dying of disease than from battle wounds.
[Elizabeth Fee, Mary E. Garofalo. Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War.] Typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery were common in the army hospitals.
Nightingale and her team established a kitchen, laundry and increased hygiene. More nurses arrived to aid in the efforts and the General Hospital at Scutari was able to care for 6,000 patients.
Nightingale's contributions still influence humanitarian aid efforts. This is especially true in regard to Nightingale's use of statistics and measures of mortality and morbidity. Nightingale used principles of new science and statistics to measure progress and plan for her hospital.
She kept records of the number and cause of deaths in order to continuously improve the conditions in hospitals.
[Understanding Uncertainty. Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War.] Her findings were that in every 1,000 soldiers, 600 were dying of communicable and infectious diseases.
[Hosein Karimi, Negin Masoudi Alavi. Florence Nightingale: The Mother of Nursing. Nurs Midwifery Stud. 2015 Jun;4(2).] She worked to improve hygiene, nutrition and clean water and decreased the mortality rate from 60% to 42% to 2.2%.
All of these improvements are pillars of modern humanitarian intervention. Once she returned to Great Britain she campaigned for the founding of the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army.
She advocated for the use of statistics and coxcombs to portray the needs of those in conflict settings.
![Battaglia di Solferino (Henry Dunant)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Battaglia_di_Solferino_%28Henry_Dunant%29.jpg)
The most well-known origin story of formalized humanitarian aid is that of
Henri Dunant
Henry Dunant (born Jean-Henri Dunant; 8 May 182830 October 1910), also known as Henri Dunant, was a Swiss humanitarian, businessman, and social activist. He was the visionary, promoter, and co-founder of the Red Cross. In 1901, he received the ...
, a Swiss businessman and social activist, who upon seeing the sheer destruction and inhumane abandonment of wounded soldiers from
the Battle of Solferino in June 1859, canceled his plans and began a relief response. Despite little to no experience as a medical physician, Dunant worked alongside local volunteers to assist the wounded soldiers from all warring parties, including Austrian, Italian and French casualties, in any way he could including the provision of food, water, and medical supplies. His graphic account of the immense suffering he witnessed, written in his book ''
A Memory of Solferino'', became a foundational text to modern
humanitarianism
Humanitarianism is an active belief in the value of human life, whereby humans practice benevolent treatment and provide assistance to other humans to reduce suffering and improve the conditions of humanity for moral, altruistic, and emotional ...
.
![Souvenir de Solferino henri Dunant 1862](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Souvenir_de_Solferino_henri_Dunant_1862.jpg)
''A Memory of Solferino'' changed the world in a way that no one, let alone Dunant, could have foreseen nor truly appreciated at the time. To start, Dunant was able to profoundly stir the emotions of his readers by bringing the battle and suffering into their homes, equipping them to understand the current barbaric state of war and treatment of soldiers after they were injured or killed; in of themselves these accounts altered the course of history. Beyond this, in his two-week experience attending to the wounded soldiers of all nationalities, Dunant inadvertently established the vital conceptual pillars of what would later become the
International Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC; french: Comité international de la Croix-Rouge) is a humanitarian organization which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and it is also a three-time Nobel Prize Laureate. State parties (signato ...
and
International Humanitarian Law
International humanitarian law (IHL), also referred to as the laws of armed conflict, is the law that regulates the conduct of war (''jus in bello''). It is a branch of international law that seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict by prot ...
: impartiality and neutrality. Dunant took these ideas and came up with two more ingenious concepts that would profoundly alter the practice of war; first Dunant envisioned a creation of permanent volunteer relief societies, much like the ad hoc relief group he coordinated in Solferino, to assist wounded soldiers; next Dunant began an effort to call for the adoption of a treaty which would guarantee the protection of wounded soldiers and any who attempted to come to their aid.
After publishing his foundational text in 1862, progress came quickly for Dunant and his efforts to create a permanent relief society and International Humanitarian Law. The embryonic formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross had begun to take shape in 1863 when the private Geneva Society of Public Welfare created a permanent sub-committee called "The International Committee for Aid to Wounded in Situations of War". Composed of five Geneva citizens, this committee endorsed Dunant's vision to legally neutralize medical personnel responding to wounded soldiers. The constitutive conference of this committee in October 1863 created the statutory foundation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in their resolutions regarding national societies, caring for the wounded, their symbol, and most importantly the indispensable neutrality of ambulances, hospitals, medical personnel and the wounded themselves. Beyond this, in order to solidify humanitarian practice, the Geneva Society of Public Welfare hosted a convention between 8 and 22 August 1864 at the Geneva Town Hall with 16 diverse States present, including many governments of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the United States of America (USA), Brazil and Mexico. This diplomatic conference was exceptional, not due to the number or status of its attendees but rather because of its very raison d'être. Unlike many diplomatic conferences before it, this conference's purpose was not to reach a settlement after a conflict nor to mediate between opposing interests; indeed this conference was to lay down rules for the future of conflict with aims to protect medical services and those wounded in battle.
![Original Geneva Conventions](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Original_Geneva_Conventions.jpg)
The first of the renowned Geneva Conventions was signed on 22 August 1864; never before in history has a treaty so greatly impacted how warring parties engage with one another. The basic tenents of the convention outlined the neutrality of medical services, including hospitals, ambulances, and related personnel, the requirement to care for and protect the sick and wounded during the conflict and something of particular symbolic importance to the International Committee of the Red Cross: the Red Cross emblem. For the first time in contemporary history, it was acknowledged by a representative selection of states that war had limits. The significance only grew with time in the revision and adaptation of the Geneva Convention in 1906, 1929 and 1949; additionally, supplementary treaties granted protection to hospital ships, prisoners of war and most importantly to civilians in wartime.
The International Committee of the Red Cross exists to this day as the guardian of International Humanitarian Law and as one of the largest providers of humanitarian aid in the world.
![Madras famine 1877](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Madras_famine_1877.jpg)
Another such examples occurred in response to the
Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879
The Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879 ( zh, 丁戊奇荒) was marked by drought-induced crop failures and subsequent widespread starvation. Between 9.5 and 13 million people in China died, mostly in Shanxi province (5.5 million dead), but al ...
, brought about by a drought that began in northern China in 1875 and led to crop failures in the following years. As many as 10 million people may have died in the famine. British missionary
Timothy Richard
Timothy Richard (Chinese: 李提摩太 ''Li Timotai'', 10 October 1845 – 17 April 1919) was a Welsh Baptist missionary to China, who influenced the modernisation of China and the rise of the Chinese Republic.
Biography
Richard was born on ...
first called international attention to the famine in
Shandong
Shandong ( , ; ; alternately romanized as Shantung) is a coastal province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the East China region.
Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history since the beginning of Chinese civilizati ...
in the summer of 1876 and appealed to the foreign community in
Shanghai
Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...
for money to help the victims. The Shandong Famine Relief Committee was soon established with the participation of diplomats, businessmen, and Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries. To combat the famine, an international network was set up to solicit donations. These efforts brought in 204,000 silver
s, the equivalent of $7–10 million in 2012 silver prices.
A simultaneous campaign was launched in response to the
Great Famine of 1876–78
Great may refer to: Descriptions or measurements
* Great, a relative measurement in physical space, see Size
* Greatness, being divine, majestic, superior, majestic, or transcendent
People
* List of people known as "the Great"
*Artel Great (born ...
in
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. Although the authorities have been criticized for their
laissez-faire
''Laissez-faire'' ( ; from french: laissez faire , ) is an economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies) deriving from special interest groups. ...
attitude during the famine, relief measures were introduced towards the end. A Famine Relief Fund was set up in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
and had raised £426,000 within the first few months.
1980s
![Opbushel](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Opbushel.jpg)
Early attempts were in private hands and were limited in their financial and organizational capabilities. It was only in the 1980s, that global news coverage and celebrity endorsement were mobilized to galvanize large-scale government-led famine (and other forms of) relief in response to disasters around the world. The
1983–85 famine in Ethiopia caused upwards of 1 million deaths and was documented by a
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
describing "a biblical famine in the 20th Century" and "the closest thing to hell on Earth".
induced millions of people in the West to donate money and to urge their governments to participate in the relief effort in Ethiopia. Some of the proceeds also went to the famine hit areas of Eritrea.
, resulted in the creation of the Humanitarian Cluster System, designed to improve coordination between humanitarian agencies working on the same issues.
, Turkey. An initiative of United Nations Secretary-General
, the World Humanitarian Summit included participants from governments, civil society organizations, private organizations, and groups affected by humanitarian need. Issues that were discussed included: preventing and ending conflict, managing crises, and aid financing.
Attendees at the summit agreed a series of reforms on aid spending called the
including a commitment to spend 25% of aid funds directly through local and national humanitarian aid organizations.
s from individuals, corporations, governments and other organizations. The funding and delivery of humanitarian aid is increasingly international, making it much faster, more responsive, and more effective in coping to major emergencies affecting large numbers of people (e.g. see
). The United Nations
(OCHA) coordinates the international humanitarian response to a crisis or emergency pursuant to Resolution 46/182 of the
. The need for aid is ever-increasing and has long outstripped the financial resources available.
The Central Emergency Response Fund was created at the 2005 Central Emergency Response Fund at the
Humanitarian aid spans a wide range of activities, including providing food aid, shelter, education, healthcare or
. The majority of aid is provided in the form of in-kind goods or assistance, with cash and vouchers constituting only 6% of total humanitarian spending.