Humanitarian emergencies: causes, responses, and global impact

Safety

Humanitarian Emergencies

The United Nations defines a complex humanitarian emergency (CHE) as a humanitarian crisis in a country, region, or society where there is total or substantial breakdown of authority ensuing from internal or external conflict and which necessitates an international response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of any single or ongoing UN country program. Such emergencies necessitate customized, focused, and practical field reactions to be structured within short time frames, frequently under difficult convenience, security, and climate circumstances. Over the years, operational efficiency in the field of humanitarian aid has increased because of experience and research carried out during these emergencies (Complex Humanitarian Emergency Program, 2012).

Humanitarian assistance is the aid to an affected population, which serves as its primary purpose to save lives and alleviate suffering of a crisis-affected population. Humanitarian assistance must be offered in accordance with the basic humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, and neutrality. The preponderance of assistance is in keeping with the recovery and treatment of basic public health infrastructure required both by civilian and military-aid providers under mandates of the international humanitarian law. These humanitarian aid missions have, in the recent past, been mainly focused on refugee and internally displaced populations (IDPs), most frequently in rural settings (Complex Humanitarian Emergency Program, 2012).

Example

In 2011 aid agencies launched multimillion dollar appeal to address a mounting humanitarian emergency in east Africa, where severe drought and high food prices had left 10 million people requiring assistance. Two consecutive failed rainy seasons in 12 months led to the driest year since 1951 in regions such as Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda. Hunger levels jumped sharply, with rates of severe malnutrition rising as high as five times the emergency threshold. The drought also decimated livestock and cereal prices soared (Rice, 2011).

Oxfam launched its biggest ever appeal for Africa, seeking 50 million to help three million people. Christian Aid and Save the Children also launched an appeal. The British government gave 38 million in emergency food aid to Ethiopia. Up to 1,000 Somalis every day were streaming across the Kenyan border to Dadaab, which was already the largest refugee settlement in the world. Thousands of Somalis walked for weeks to reach the camp, many of them arriving acutely malnourished, dehydrated, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Some 2.5 million people required food aid in Somalia, but access was tough, particularly in the south, where an Islamist insurgency made it hard, and in some parts impossible, for aid groups to function. To the west, in Ethiopia, over three million people required humanitarian assistance. Pastoralist communities there saw eighty percent of their livestock die in some places, according to Oxfam, with the lost income made it extremely difficult for people to buy food. In Uganda 600,000 people needed assistance, and in Djibouti it was 120,000. But the greatest number of people in need, 3.5 million, were in Kenya's arid northern regions, whose marginalization by the government has magnified the effects of the increasingly frequent droughts. In Turkana malnutrition rates were more than twice the emergency level (Rice, 2011).