This background note focuses on the current discussion among actors in the humanitarian and social protection sectors regarding the use of existing social protection programmes to provide an emergency response. It outlines the overlaps between social protection and humanitarian responses, considers a range of recent examples from lowand middle-income countries and sets out a set of key consider...

BACKGROUND Neonatal deaths account for over 40% of all deaths in children younger than five years of age and neonatal mortality rates are highest in areas affected by humanitarian emergencies. Of the ten countries with the highest neonatal mortality rates globally, six are currently or recently affected by a humanitarian emergency. Yet, little is known about newborn care in crisis settings. Und...

This article examines the relationship between humanitarian aid and ecologically unequal exchange in the context of post-disaster reconstruction. I assess the manner in which humanitarian aid became a central part of the reconstruction process in India's Tamil Nadu state following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This article focuses on how the humanitarian “gift” of housing became a ...

This analysis of the social and political orientations of the Swedish humanitarian field, comprising here both NGOs active in humanitarian projects and the governmental Swedish International Cooperation Development Agency (SIDA), reveals once more the dominance of the Swedish social democratic model. This research is based on a selection of 23 humanitarian organizations from a survey of some 20...

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in humanitarian relief provide supplies and services to people in need. Transportation and logistics are big parts of NGO operations, as agencies transport and distribute supplies to and within the affected regions. Improving efficiency of their logistics systems has potential to significantly decrease agencies’ operational costs and expand their se...

In the foreseeable future, it is more than likely that the types, dimensions, and dynamics of crisis drivers will increase dramatically, in some instances exponentially. While a growing number of organizations with humanitarian roles and responsibilities sense that such changes are afoot, few have looked at how these might fundamentally affect not only what they do but also how they do it. This...

OBJECTIVE To describe tools used for the assessment of maternal and child health issues in humanitarian emergency settings. METHODS We systematically searched MEDLINE, Web of Knowledge and POPLINE databases for studies published between January 2000 and June 2014. We also searched the websites of organizations active in humanitarian emergencies. We included studies reporting the development o...

The Second Dartmouth Device Development Symposium held in October 2004 brought together leaders from the medical device community, including clinical investigators, senior representatives from the US Food and Drug Administration, large and small device manufacturers, and representatives from the financial community to examine difficult issues confronting device development. The role of the Huma...

In the last ten years, international organizations have defined more clearly the role and the tasks of humanitarian aid in contemporary international relations. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a good illustration of the advantages but also of the disadvantages of today’s humanitarian operations. The peacekeeping operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the largest operation of this kind tha...

Humanitarian demining is a labor-intensive and high-risk which could benefit from the development of a humanitarian mine detection robot, capable of scanning a minefield semiautomatically. The design of such an outdoor autonomous robots requires the consideration and integration of multiple aspects: sensing, data fusion, path and motion planning and robot control embedded in a control and softw...