International Disasters Final Study Guide

4 Core Humanitarian Principles

1. Humanity

2. Neutrality

3. Impartiality

4. Independence

Humanity

Human suffering must be addressed wherever it is found. We must protect life and ensure respect

Neutrality

Humanitarian actors must not take sides or engage in controversies

Impartiality

Humanitarian action must be carried out on the basis of need alone, giving priority to the most urgent cases and making no distinctions on the basis of nationality, race, gender, religion, class, or political opinion

Independence

Humanitarian action must be autonomous from the political, economic, military, or other objectives that any actor may hold

Level 3 Emergency

Exceptional in scale, complexity, urgency, capacity

• Requires system-wide emergency activation

Integrated Phase Classification (IPC)

A methodology for assessing the severity of food insecurity

Refugee

Person forced to leave their country → crosses an international border

IDP

Forced to flee home but remains within their own country’s orders

SPHERE Cash Transfers

Conditional, unconditional, restricted, unrestricted

Conditional

Beneficiary must complete a requirement before transfer occurs (Ex. cash for work, food for training)

Unconditional

No requirements must be met (general food distribution)

Restricted

Limited choice on how it can be spent (Ex. commodity voucher)

Unrestricted

No restrictions on how it can be spent (Ex. cash)

General Food Ration

• 2,100 calories/day

  • 40-60 g/protein

  • 40-50 g/fat

  • 75-85% of calories from cereals

  • 10-15% of calories from pulses

  • 10% of calories from oils

Food rations should always

• Include a cereal, pulse, and oil

• Be culturally appropriate 

Modality

Direct food aid, vouchers, cash

Value and Vouchers

• Value: paper, token, card that can be exchanged for a set value of goods within a category (Ex. $50 of food commodity)

• Vouchers: paper, token, or electronic card that can be exchanged for a set of goods including services (Ex. 5kg beans)

  • Cash vouchers could damage markers and producers/farmers by driving down prices for goods

Food Assistance

• Focuses on domestic programs (Ex. SNAP, WIC)

  • Assistance: providing resources for the purpose of getting food

Food Aid

International, transferring food and commodities

4 Basic Needs

1. Water supply

2. Sanitation and hygiene promotion (WASH)

3. Food security and nutrition

4. Shelter and settlement

Key UN Players

• OCHA: brings together humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent response to emergencies

• UNICEF: Nutrition, water, sanitation, hygiene, education

• WHO: Health

• WFP: Food security, emergency telecommunications, logistics 

PVOs/BINGOS

• CARE

• Save the Children

• IRC

• IFRC

• MSF

• Mercy Corp

• World Vision

Resilience Capacities

Absorptive, adaptive, transformative

Absorptive

Stability, persistence

• Ex. financial services, insurance, health systems preparedness

Adaptive

Flexibility, incremental adjustment

• Ex. income diversification, social distancing, precision agriculture

Transformative

Change, transformational responses

• Ex. infrastructure, good governance, new politics, cultural norms

Vulnerability

• Environmental: built and natural

• Social: poverty, fragility, social fragmentation/exclusion)

Well-being outcomes

• Nutrition, Food security, mental health

• Outcomes include mortality, injuries, homelessness, those affected, and economic losses

Bonding

bonds between community or group members

Bridging

Connects members of one community or group to members of other communities/groups

Linking

Vertical link between a network and a form of authority

Psychosocial resilience capacities

1. Risk perception

2. Aspirations

3. Self-efficacy

Risk perceptions

Perceived risk of experiencing a slow-onset or sudden shock. Perceived risk associated with employing certain strategies to maintain or improve wellbeing after a shock

Aspirations

Fatalism is the sense of being powerless to enact change and having no control over life’s events

Self-efficacy

Belief in one’s own ability to perform a task and to manage prospective situations

GAM

• Moderate and severe wasting with the addition of kids with edema (SAM + MAM)

• Measured by mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), oedema, or wasting

• Trigger level is > 15% among children (implement CMAM)

• Normal: >-2 Z score, Moderate -2-3 Z score, Severe <-3 Z score

SAM

Wasting, stunting, underweight <-3 z-score

• Severe wasting and kids with edema

MAM

Wasting, stunting, underweight between -2 and -3 z-scores 

• Moderate wasting

Wasting vs GAM

• Wasting: low weight for height

• Marasmus: thinness

• Kwashiorkor: edema

SMART Surveys

Simplified and standardized methodological survey to be used in cases of emergency

• Now used in developing contexts

• Nutrition and mortality

• Uses manual surveys, software, forms/questionnaires, report, website

• Prone to data entry error

Famine

Area needs to have extreme critical levels of acute malnutrition and mortality

Genocide

The intentional destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, religion, race, or nationality including killing, preventing births, or causing serious harm to wipe them out entirely

Ethnic cleansing

Forced removal of a group from a specific area to make it “ethnically pure,” often using violence, threats, or destruction, but not necessarily aiming to destroy the group completely

Phase 1: Normal/Minimal

Households can meet essential food and non-food needs

Phase 2: Stressed

Households have minimally adequate food consumption but are unable to afford some essential non-food expenditures 

Phase 3: Crisis

• Households either have food consumption gaps that are reflected by high or above-usual malnutrition

• OR are marginally able to meet minimum food needs, only by depleting essential livelihood assets 

• Urgent action required

Phase 4: Emergency

• Households have large food consumption gaps and high acute malnutrition/excess mortality

• OR are able to mitigate large food consumption gaps, only by employing emergency livelihood strategies and asset liquidation

Phase 5: Catastrophe/Famine

• Households have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs, even after full employment of coping strategies

• Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident

Supplementary Feeding

For people at risk of SAM/MAM, pregnant and lactating people

• Not necessarily medical emergency

• Supplementary feeding programs (SFP)

• CFB++ places emphasis on local participation, capacity building

• Unless kid cannot eat on its own

Therapeutic Feeding

Disease could spread in close quarters (risk anytime you have population density) for SAM

• Used for treating SAM

• Often in medical/clinal setting

• FUTF

Case studies: challenges

funding and coordination

Haiti difference

island, hard to accees

UN Cluster system

• The United Nations uses a multi-pronged Cluster Approach to coordinate humanitarian and emergency relief for disasters

• It is activated usually at level 3, but generally when a country’s government/systems are overwhelmed and in need of support

UN Cluster: food security, nutrition, health

• Food security: WFP, FAO

• Nutrition: UNICEF

• Health: WHO

SPHERE

Rwanda complex emergency (1994)

Cluster system

Great Asian Tsunami (2006): organizational structure for coordination of disaster response co-coordinated by UN partners and national governments when possible

IASC Transformative agenda

• Haiti Earthquake (2001)

  • Identifying level 3 emergencies, ensuring competent leadership, accountability, improved coordination

Global health security

Encompasses activities required, both proactive and reactive, to minimize the danger and impact of acute public health events that endanger people’s health across geographical regions and international boundaries

• Involves building strong, resilient public health systems throughout the world that can prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies

4 Core Capacities

1. Laboratory

2. Surveillance

3. Emergency Operations

4. Workforce Development

Measles and GHS

Measles can hinder disaster response because they are highly contagious and leads to higher mortality among malnourished children

• A vaccination threshold of 95% is recommended for herd immunity

Gerber Lecture: ebola

• Weak public health infrastructure

• Decades of war

• Spotty border control

• Lack of infection control in healthcare facilities

• Unrecognized cases of Ebola reaching poor/crowded cities

Watkins: tech

• Satellite Imagery, sms alert systems, social media monitoring

Satellite imagery

• identifies things like burned villages, flood damage, areas where people have left

  • Challenge: images can be expensive and sometimes the computer doesn’t recognize buildings in rural areas correctly

SMS

•  sends warning messages (like about flood or violence) to people’s phones quickly, even in remote areas

  • Challenge: not everyone has a phone, some places have no signal or the phones are not smartphones

Social Media Monitoring

• uses posts from platforms like twitter to track what’s happening in real time, like protests or food shortages

  • Challenge: not everyone uses social media, especially in rural or very poor areas, so information may not be complete

Syndromic Surveillance importance

•  provides early warning for new pathogens for which there are not yet tests or for which lab capacity is weak. Good that it can be in real-time and can see early indications of real problems

Methods

social media, spikes in health facility consultations for some symptoms/signs