Browse by Theme: Humanitarian

Co-authored by Ros MacVean, Safeguarding Coordinator, CARE International, and Howard Mollett, Senior Policy Advisor, CARE International UK: Today’s Summit on Safeguarding provides an important moment for international donors, UN agencies and humanitarian agencies working on the ground to outline their commitments on how to better protect both staff and members of the communities we aim to support from sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment.

The narrative coming out of the European Union is that the private sector can provide the ‘solution’ to Europe’s concerns about migration. Is this about a more equitable partnership with African countries, or is it just self-interest and buying into populist fears?

For the people we work with and for, the divisions and brick walls between humanitarian and development work do not make sense. So why does the sector keep this division as the norm, rather than the exception?

I’ve just returned from Bangladesh where I’ve been working with CARE’s shelter team to build ‘mid-term shelters’ for refugees who have fled from Myanmar. With the camps now in place for a year, what are the challenges of shifting from short-term emergency response to longer-term support – and how can we make sure that families and communities are at the centre of the process?

In recent years, innovation has been touted as the way to bridge the gap between the humanitarian and development needs of the world and the capacity we have to meet them. But is the focus on innovation distracting us from the task of actually making a difference, at the necessary scale?

CARE Yemen's response to the crisis has been to buy local and to build local. The ability of humanitarian agencies to respond in Yemen is currently under threat - but the impact of that work is crucial not just in meeting immediate needs, but in building local capacity to meet needs in the longer term. Here's what one of CARE's emergency response projects in Yemen has achieved, and how we did it.

Aid, including humanitarian aid, is increasingly being related to, and justified by, a goal to limit migration from poor and fragile countries to wealthier countries [1]. This is a problematic approach for several reasons, so how should humanitarian and development NGOs respond?