Category: International Cooperation

7 Tips For Becoming An International Aid Worker

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1. Educate Yourself – Unless you have extensive volunteer experience, a master’s degree is a ‘must’ for the NGO world.  Although a master’s degree doesn’t have to be completely aimed at a humanitarian crisis skill like food security, it should work on something applicable, either through a course of study or dissertation.

2. Volunteer – Even with a master’s degree, it is close to impossible to land your first job without some internship experience on your CV. Regrettably for do-gooders everywhere, unpaid internships are the norm for NGOs. 

3. Look Local – If you don’t have the resources to volunteer abroad for a few months or work an unpaid internship, volunteer with a small, local NGO where you are living. It will give you some experience in the meantime and might end up opening doors in the future. An added bonus is that you can keep your day job while volunteering, ensuring that you have a steady paycheck. Sites like Idealist.com can help match you with organizations to volunteer with, depending on your interests.

4. Bring a Skill – Having skills like nutrition, finance or nursing can also be an easy way to fast-track your career with a humanitarian organization.

5. Plan Ahead – What areas of the world interest you? Research conflicts in the region and see how your abilities align. Although this strategy won’t work for an emergency response to something like an earthquake, try to get to the crisis earlier than most so that you are on the ground at the beginning of the humanitarian efforts.

6. Own the Head Office – A year’s stint at the head office of an international humanitarian organization could be your ticket to the world, connecting you to the right people for the next two, three, even four jobs down the line. If your peers or superiors notice your work, they are more likely to connect you with the right people and support your long-term career goals.

7. Scour the Web – Once you’ve got the skills and experience, it’s time to hit the world wide web looking for job opportunities. Search sites like Reliefweb.int, Trust.org or DevNetJobs.org for international postings. Passionate about a particular organization like Doctor’s Without Borders or One Acre Fund? Check their website regularly for new positions. 

 [Read full Forbes article, by Alexandra Talty] 

Clinton challenge to solve the global food crisis

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President Clinton challenged business students to solve the global food crisis for $1 million in seed money. Here are the finalists for the Hult Prize.

Aspire (McGill University, Canada) is hoping to solve the world’s hunger crisis one bug at a time. The startup provides low-cost insect farming systems to local farmers to help them harvest insects like crickets and grasshoppers year-round. Aspire then buys the insects — which are full of nutrients — from the farmers and distributes them to urban slums. Not only does this create income stability for the farmers, but it provides consistent nutrition at a more affordable price to those in need.

Reel Gardening (University of Capetown, South Africa) has what it calls a “fail-proof” seed system that can be grown into a vegetable or herb garden in nearly any climate. The startup created a paper strip that comes pre-packaged with seeds and fertilizers so it can be easily planted and maintained. The strips save 80% of water compared to more traditional methods of planting.

SokoText (The London School of Economics and Political Science) helps multiple vendors in urban slums combine produce orders so they’re able to place a cheaper wholesale purchase. Otherwise, small-scale vegetable sellers often can’t afford to buy produce in bulk. Vendors text their orders, and Sokotext responds with prices. The next morning, vendors can pick up their order from the outlet.

Origin (Esade Business School, Dubai) wants to use handheld technology to connect small vendors in slums directly with produce farmers, cutting out the middleman entirely. The startup launched a pilot program in Mumbai, providing vendors with handheld digital devices where they could place orders for fresh produce, which Origin passed on to local farmers. “By doing this, we can shorten the supply chain for fresh food to these communities and also bring down prices,” said Jon Myer, part of Origin’s team.

Poshnam (Asian Institute of Management, Shanghai) hopes to change the fact that over 1 billion tons of unsold food is wasted every year. The startup plans to purchase excess vegetables and grains from farmers and then use vendors to sell it at a discounted rate inside urban slums. Poshnam wants to train local women entrepreneurs to operate its mobile carts.

Pulse (Hult International Business School, San Francisco) developed an SMS-based system that allows the vendor to text a store credit to customers or put the credit on a card that the shopper can use for future purchases, to address the problem that in developing countries, vendors often can’t make the correct change after purchases.  “This helps households who don’t have access to credit cards to develop a safety net for their money to buy food in the future,” said Saul Minkoff, Pulse’s team leader.

[CNN]

US Military Aid to Egypt being reassessed

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When Egypt’s first democratically elected president was tossed out earlier this year, the White House stopped short of calling it a coup. Doing so would have forced an end to the $1.3 billion that the U.S. sends in military aid every year — and changed the course of its relationship with its strongest Arab ally in the region.

But that was before Wednesday, when the military-led interim government stormed two camps full of former President Mohamed Morsy’s supporters. More than 525 people were killed and 3,717 wounded in the bloodiest day in Egypt’s recent history, officials there said.

Will the carnage in Egypt change the U.S. policy toward the most populous Arab country? The short answer: We’ll have to wait and see.

To understand why, one needs to appreciate the importance of Egypt in U.S. foreign policy. The United States helps Egypt because it’s one of only two Arab countries — along with Jordan — that made peace with Israel. In return, Egypt gets a billion dollars each year of U.S. taxpayer money for military and civilian programs. No other country except Israel gets more. That aid buys Washington an ally to depend on in a turbulent region.

It’s not just the peace process and regional stability that the United States is interested in. Egypt controls the Suez Canal, a crucial sea route used by more than 4% of the world’s oil traffic and 8% of all seaborne trade. So far, the canal is running smoothly. But a disruption there could end up hitting Americans in the pocketbook, not to mention impact the safe passage of U.S. military ships and equipment.

Then there’s business for American companies, intelligence cooperation — and the military relationship. “The reality is that the Egyptian military has not only been a source of stability for the United States in an otherwise turbulent Middle East, but it has also been a cash cow,” said Khairi Abaza, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Currently, the Egyptian military relies on U.S. military equipment, training and services. This reliance means that Egypt is essentially a client of the U.S. military complex, and aid money is in fact re-injected back into the U.S. economy.”

“The United States faces a really tough dilemma now,” Middle East analyst Robin Wright with the Wilson Center said. “What to do about the most important country in the Arab world, the cornerstone of the peace process, a country that has received over $30 billion in U.S. aid since the peace process began in the late 1970s.”

CNN

Defining Humanitarian Aid

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Within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a committee of 24 members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), these being: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and European institutions.

Under OECD criteria, humanitarian aid has very clear cut-off points. For example,

  • “Disaster preparedness” excludes longer-term work such as prevention of floods or conflicts.
  • “Reconstruction relief and rehabilitation” includes repairing pre-existing infrastructure but excludes longer-term activities designed to improve the level of infrastructure.
  • The term “global humanitarian assistance” is used to describe humanitarian response

“International humanitarian aid” (or “international humanitarian response”) is used to describe the contributions of:

  • international governments
  • individuals, private foundations, trusts, private companies and corporations.

Private contributions included those raised by humanitarian organizations, including NGOs, the UN and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

Source: Global Humanitarian Assistance 

The Cluster Approach to Humanitarian Relief

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In the past decade the humanitarian relief system has responded to over a thousand natural disasters and complex emergencies in the world, affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Extreme weather and climate events have increased in both frequency and intensity, placing populations and assets at great risk. On top of the growing severity of natural disasters, there are increasing numbers of internally displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers due to war or internal conflicts.

In response to this growing need, the humanitarian system has evolved into an industry, with a plethora of organizations, all with different missions, mandates, and agendas.  With the increase of humanitarian actors, the relief system has met a series of challenges, including the need to both increase resources toward humanitarian ends and to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency.  Despite efforts to confront these challenges, much criticism has been leveled at the humanitarian system for failing to meet the basic requirements of affected populations in a timely manner, with the quality of response varying greatly from crisis to crisis.

The Cluster Approach was implemented by the United Nations to address some of these concerns and to improve the coordination of humanitarian relief and actors.  Coordinating relief efforts entails minimizing the duplication of humanitarian services, whether by filling gaps or preventing overlap, and ensuring various organizations are synchronized to work together to achieve a common objective, thereby enabling a more coherent, effective, and efficient response.

Although the need for coordination in relief efforts is not disputed, there are generally two schools of thought on how coordination is best executed in humanitarian relief.  The first group is driven by governmental and inter-governmental bodies, and places an emphasis on a centralized, unified, hierarchical structure, which is assumed to be more effective and efficient.  The second group, preferred by NGOs, is based on a loose centralized approach to coordination.  This group tends to regard the centralization as a means of control over actors and focuses on how a diversity of efforts and approaches can ensure success: if one fails, all do not fail.

With a hierarchical structure featuring accountable lead agencies and encouraging equal-footed partnerships and collaboration, the Cluster Approach can be understood as an attempt to find a ‘middle-ground’ between the two schools.  Read more 

Humanitarian Aid in the form of vaccines

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We now have vaccines to prevent nearly 30 diseases. The GAVI Alliance — a public-private partnership focused on increasing access to vaccines in poor countries — has contributed to the immunization of more than 370 million children since 2000.

The World Health Organization estimates immunization programs prevent 2 million to 3 million deaths every year.

WHO also estimates we have an opportunity to reach an additional 22 million infants who live in hard-to-reach or insecure communities across the developing world. Reaching these populations is the key to achieving humanitarian milestones agreed to by the global community — chiefly, Millennium Development Goal 4, which calls for a significant reduction in child mortality by 2015.

We owe it to ourselves to seize this opportunity for a healthier and disease-free world. More importantly, we owe it to our children.

[Excerpt of article by Siddharth Chatterjee, Chief Diplomat at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies]

Global refugee numbers at 19-year high

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The number of people who have been forcibly displaced by war and other crises worldwide has risen to its highest level for almost two decades, hitting 45.2 million, according to the UN’s refugee agency.

Annual figures released by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) showed that 1.1 million fled across international borders in 2012, while a further 6.5 million were displaced within their own homelands.

“This means one in each 4.1 seconds. So each time you blink, another person is forced to flee,” Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, told reporters.

The total figure of 45.2 million included 28.8 million internally displaced people, 15.4 million border-crossing refugees, and 937,000 asylum seekers.

“War is the main reason for this very high number of refugees and people internally displaced. Fifty-five percent of them correspond to the well-known situations of  Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria,” Guterres said.

Overall, the Afghan conflict continued to produce the most refugees, a position that it has held for 32 years. Worldwide, one refugee in four is Afghan.

The UNHCR has warned that Syrian refugee numbers could hit 3.5 million by the end of this year, while there are also fears that the number currently displaced within the country, 4.25 million, will also climb. Syrian refugees have flooded into neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, stretching those nations’ ability to cope.

“Who is supporting refugees in the world? Essentially, developing countries,” he said, stressing that 87 percent of the world’s refugees were protected by developing countries, up from 70 percent a decade ago.

“So when we see discussion sometimes that exist about refugees in many developed countries, I think it’s good to remind public opinion in those countries that refugees are not people fleeing from poor countries into rich countries in search of a better life,” he added.

Pakistan remained the world’s top host nation in 2012, with 1.6 million refugees mostly from Afghanistan, followed by Iran, with 868,200, and Germany, with 589,700.

260,000 Somalians dead due to famine

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Between 2010 and 2012, more than a quarter of a million people died in the famine in Somalia — in part because the world was too slow to react, says the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Philippe Lazzarini.

Half of the 258,000 Somalis who died in the famine were children younger than 5. In the worst-affected area, Lower Shabelle, close to one in five children younger than 5 died.

A report, jointly commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network, concluded that the world did not do enough after warnings in 2010 that starvation loomed following severe drought.

The year from July 2010 to June 2011 was the driest in the eastern Horn of Africa in 60 years. This resulted in the death of livestock, small harvests and a big drop in demand for labor, cutting into household incomes. Southern Somalia also received less humanitarian assistance in 2010 and much of 2011 than it had in previous years, particularly 2008 to 2009, the report said.

And with reduced supplies available, the price of food staples soared, putting more pressure on poor households.

The result was what the researchers say was one of the worst famines in the past 25 years.

Defining Humanitarian Aid

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“Humanitarian aid” is aid and action designed to save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain and protect human dignity during and in the aftermath of emergencies. The characteristics that mark it out from other forms of foreign assistance and development aid are that:

  • it is intended to be governed by the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence
  • it is intended to be short-term in nature and provide for activities in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. In practice it is often difficult to say where ‘during and in the immediate aftermath of emergencies’ ends and other types of assistance begin, especially in situations of prolonged vulnerability.

Traditional responses to humanitarian crises, and the easiest to categorize as such, are those that fall under the aegis of ‘emergency response’:

  • material relief assistance and services (shelter, water, medicines etc.)
  • emergency food aid (short-term distribution and supplementary feeding programs)
  • relief coordination, protection and support services (coordination, logistics and communications).

Humanitarian aid can also include reconstruction and rehabilitation (repairing pre-existing infrastructure as opposed to longer-term activities designed to improve the level of infrastructure) and disaster prevention and preparedness (disaster risk reduction (DRR), early warning systems, contingency stocks and planning).

Source: Global Humanitarian Assistance

Franklin Graham claims IRS targeted his international aid ministry

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Franklin Graham, one of the U.S.’s most prominent evangelicals, says the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service included two of his ministries.The evangelical leader is the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham.

“I am bringing this to your attention because I believe that someone in the administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us,” Graham wrote in a letter Tuesday to President Barack Obama.

In September, the IRS informed the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, an international aid group, that it would review the groups’ records for the tax year ending in 2010, according to Graham. IRS agents conducted the review in October, Graham said.

“I do not believe the IRS audits of our two organizations last year is a coincidence –or justifiable,” Graham said in the letter to Obama.

The IRS did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. The agency has acknowledged that it gave extra scrutiny to tea party groups applying for federal tax exemptions. The Treasury Department’s Inspector General said in a report that the IRS’ use of “inappropriate criteria”  ended in May 2012.