American University’s Peacebuilding & Development Institute, will be hosting a roundtable discussion in Washington DC for all international aid organizations about how humanitarian assistance can and should creatively respond, ahead of the curve, to emerging emergency vulnerabilities due to the global depression. The symposium will bring representatives from the various sectors of the humanitarian community (private, public, and non-profit) together with donors to examine lessons from past economic crises and brainstorm new ways to craft and target aid to meet new and shifting humanitarian needs and priorities of the worsening economic crisis.

The discussion will pose a wide variety of questions, including:

• What can be drawn from past experiences of financial crises to improve responses to the newly emerging threats endangering the lives and livelihoods of the most vulnerable?
• What innovative solutions are aid agencies adopting in order to meet a greater number of needs with the same or fewer resources?
• Are donors thinking about and planning for the re-deployment of resources?
• What possibilities exist for programmatic changes that might be better suited for addressing the new patterns of vulnerability emerging out of the economic crisis?
• What structural and operational challenges make responding to the humanitarian consequences of the current economic crisis more difficult? How can these be addressed?
• How can aid agencies and donors become less reactive and more proactive in their approaches?

Individuals from a range of relevant organizations have been invited: including donor such as USAID, CIDA, the US State Department and the World Bank, NGOs such as CARE and Mercy Corps, and institutions, such as Brookings, the Overseas Development Institute, and CSIS, Finca, and UN agencies such as OCHA and the World Food Program.

It is the intended goal of the symposium to generate a range of innovative and unconventional interventions for addressing the humanitarian consequences of the current economic crisis. The results of the discussions will be reported without attribution and circulated in summaries to symposium participants and the larger humanitarian community. Participants will not be quoted as representing any agencies they may work for, using Chatham House rules.

Co-Sponsoring Organizations

This event is being co-sponsored by the following organizations:

 

Background

The world has recently entered into a global recession which will create new risks to the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of people. Other regional macro-economic crises in recent history, such as in Mexico, Russia, and Southeast Asia in 1997/8s, had dramatic humanitarian impacts on various population groups. The global scale of the current economic crisis may outstrip similar crises in the past, with more complex and more pervasive harms than seen in the 1930s.

While most of the attention in this crisis has been on high-level macroeconomic responses, for example among between banks and central banks, there has been correspondingly little attention to how aid programs (e.g., health, nutrition, food, shelter, microfinance, population movements, etc.) can target the newly vulnerable, such as refugees, famine victims and those whose lives are at immediate risk. What little attention has been paid to aid programs has primarily focused on budgetary matters (i.e. how the crisis is hurting aid and donor budgets). Much less attention has been toward changes in programming so that new patterns of vulnerability arising as a result the crisis can be addressed more effectively.

These humanitarian effects of a massive economic crisis are more extensive, insidious, and cumulative than other, more conventional, disasters. Defining who is in most need, and how they are in need, and targeting assistance to the affected populations will be significantly more difficult than for flood, hurricanes, drought, or outright war. The current crisis therefore challenges aid agencies to consider new ways to protect the poor in developing countries against sharp new declines in livelihoods, dislocations, and even violence.

Responding to the human impacts of the crisis will require approaches, methods and skills different from, but also additional to, how the humanitarian community has historically responded to crisis. Humanitarian aid professionals are challenged to anticipate how to re-deploy their programs and resources to avert new patterns of suffering that may result from massive unemployment, dissolution of safety nets, decrease of trade and conflict.