Gender-based violence (GBV) is a pervasive risk that cuts across continents and contexts. Programming to respond to GBV saves lives and mitigates the debilitating consequences of violence. Yet such programming and funding to support it remains a secondary priority in humanitarian crises and development contexts. The dearth of responses is often attributed to… Read more »
Information and communication technology is evolving at an extraordinary pace, changing the way we live and work. In recent years, advances in mobile phone penetration and other new technologies in low-income and disaster-affected countries mean that there is growing interest from donors, practitioners and governments as to how technology can serve humanitarian responses. This article… Read more »
Faith-Based Communities (FBCs) provide 40% to 50% of healthcare in developing countries and contribute greatly to HIV responses. One in five organisations working on HIV programmes are faith-based. Yet, during large-scale emergency responses, humanitarian actors have not realised the potential of FBCs to undertake HIV programming, nor have they utilised it by supporting or partnering… Read more »
What do we mean by partnership in humanitarian action, and what does partnership look like in practice? Effective humanitarian partnerships are about more than mechanistic relationships where actors come together to achieve a set of common objectives, dividing up responsibilities and planning joint work. They also involve underlying issues of power, attitudes and styles of… Read more »
Since 1999, UN peacekeeping missions have been explicitly mandated to protect civilians under threat. On the ground, however, there remains a significant degree of confusion amongst soldiers and civilians working within peacekeeping missions about what exactly this civilian protection mandate entails. This article provides a brief summary of Oxfams experiences of engaging with peacekeeping missions… Read more »
Humanitarian agencies rely heavily on the media to raise awareness of crises and generate income. For the media, however, the driving force is the search for a story. Despite levels of death and destruction far outstripping the acute crises which seize the headlines, chronic emergencies such as civil wars and ongoing famines are neither immediate… Read more »
In early November last year, television images showed the world thousands of people fleeing fighting between the government and rebels in eastern DRC. But these events were only a spike in what has been a long-running crisis. Every month, tens of thousands of people are forced to flee their homes due to fighting among and… Read more »
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is often characterised as one of the most if not the most neglected humanitarian crises in the world. The often-cited International Rescue Committee (IRC) mortality survey updated in 2008 estimates that, between August 1998 and April 2007, armed conflict and state collapse led to 5.4… Read more »
On 6 February 2000, the New York Times published an in-depth, front-page article on the then 17-month-old conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The article gave a nuanced account of what had been called Africas first world war, describing in detail the complex history and root causes, the regional politics, the interests of the… Read more »
