Browse by Theme: Humanitarian

While 3.9 million people have fled Syria, EU heads of state meeting in Brussels – with migration at the top of the agenda – are focusing more on containment and return, than on providing safe and legal options for asylum. The unprecedented global refugee crisis needs a new approach and Europe’s response falls far short.

Over the past 20 years much has been done to ensure that responses to sexual violence in emergencies are put in place. Years of advocacy, lobbying and implementation on a shoe-string have ensured that gender-based and sexual violence is at least being talked about in the right places and at the right level (such as last year’s Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, led by William Hague and Angelina Jolie). But are we turning a blind eye to one of the biggest, and most silent, human rights violations of our time?

The APPG on Population, Development and Reproductive Health in collaboration with CARE International is holding a panel discussion in the House of Lords on 2 July on talking points and issues from a forthcoming CARE International paper on Child Marriage in Emergencies.

This year, world leaders are set to renegotiate global commitments on poverty, climate change and development financing. At the same time, the United Nations has commissioned major reviews of UN efforts on humanitarian coordination, peacebuilding and peacekeeping operations. It is therefore timely, but unfortunate and symptomatic, that the 15th anniversary review of UN commitments to protect and empower women in times of conflict is also happening in 2015, but in a silo from those wider reforms.

Every year, hundreds of women’s rights activists come to New York to lobby governments in the United Nations on gender equality during the annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). This year, CARE International has partnered with UN Women and the World Humanitarian Summit Secretariat to convene a workshop during CSW to consult activists from countries torn apart by war and natural disasters on how to better protect and empower women and girls in times of crisis.

This week, a major international donor conference took place in Brussels to plan the rebuilding of Ebola hit countries. Having just recently returned from Sierra Leone and Liberia, I was hoping to see a gender transformative approach informing donor commitment – because I had seen for myself how the impact of the crisis is affecting women and girls.

I am currently in Budapest, Hungary, attending the second of two days of regional consultations. This is the fourth in a series of regional consultations leading up to the May 2016 World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) taking place in Istanbul. The WHS will be a major event. It will be the first-ever global humanitarian summit of this scale. It also has an ambitious goal: the summit aims to find new ways to tackle humanitarian needs in our fast-changing world – a topic close to the heart of CARE’s work.