Humanitarian
Leadership Academy to train aid workers from over 50 countries in organising
rapid responses to disasters and emergencies
The Guardian, Julian Borger Diplomatic editor, Sunday 22 March 2015
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| Local residents receive humanitarian aid in the city of Debaltseve, Ukraine. The world’s first academy for humanitarian relief will train aid workers in responding to disasters and emergencies. Photograph: Sokolov Mikhail/ Sokolov Mikhail/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis |
The world’s
first academy for humanitarian relief is to be launched, aimed at training
100,000 aid workers from over 50 countries in organising rapid responses to
disasters and emergencies.
The
Humanitarian Leadership Academy, launching on Monday, is a response to the
growing number of humanitarian crises around the world, driven by climate
change and conflict, combined with a severe and worsening shortage of people
with the skills necessary to coordinate the large-scale response required in
the critical first days to prevent mass casualties.
The HLA is
being set up by a global consortium of aid organisations with initial £20m
funding from the UK Department for International Development, out of a target
of £50m. The Save the Children charity has paid the startup costing and is
hosting the academy’s hub in London.
Further
centres will open in Kenya and the Philippines later this year, and by 2020 the
plan is to have ten training centres around the world, which would offer both
classroom and virtual training for the surrounding regions, in mobilising the
rapid response in resources and manpower needed in the wake of a disaster.
Jan
Egeland, a former UN head of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, will be
the academy’s first chairman. He said the initiative “may revolutionise the
entire humanitarian sector”.
“Investment
in a new and better trained generation of humanitarian workers closer to where
we find the greatest needs will bring development and sustainability to many of
the world’s most fragile communities,” Egeland, the head of the Norwegian
Refugee Council, said.
Last year
witnessed a record number of severe global humanitarian emergencies and the
highest number of refugees the world has seen since the second world war. 50
million people were forced to flee their countries.
Justin
Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children, said: “If we are to save more
lives in some of the toughest places in the world we need to train and support
local people themselves to become the humanitarian workers and volunteers of
the future. The academy will do this by bringing together an extraordinary and
unique coalition of actors to train and share best practice, transforming the
humanitarian system.”
The idea
behind the establishment of ten national and regional centres around the world
is that each should be able to tailor responses to crises in terms of local
conditions and local culture. Aid experts have said that previous attempts to
increase local and regional capacity to react to large-scale emergencies have
foundered because they were seen as impositions of practices developed far
away.
The plan is
for each centre to provide a common pool of knowledge, the latest technology
and examples of best practice, as well as solid career structures for
humanitarian workers, with internationally recognised certification for
successive levels of achievement, recorded in ‘humanitarian passports’. The end
result should be to expand the pool of people available in every region to
manage the humanitarian response in the first 72 hours of an emergency.
“This is
potentially one of the most transformational projects I have been involved in,”
said Gareth Owen, Save the Children’s director of emergencies, who has been
working on the academy project since 2007. “It is based on the recognition that
many studies of humanitarian disasters and emergencies point to leadership and
decision-making as the critical factor. Really by now we should have a global
capacity that we can draw on that is far greater and more diverse. We haven’t
invested enough in people on the ground.”
Owen said
that climate change was adding to the relentless annual toll of humanitarian
crises: “We used to have a big natural disaster about once a decade and that
has come down to one every two or three years.”
Global
funding for emergency relief has largely stagnated. Owen said the $20bn (£13bn)
spending on the response to humanitarian emergencies is a third of the amount
the world spends on yoghurt, for example, and that there is no comparison with
the $1.5tn spent on arms.
“The
Humanitarian Leadership Academy will help create a faster and more effective
disaster response system by empowering local people in the most vulnerable
countries to be the first responders after a disaster strikes,” Justine
Greening, the secretary of state for international development, said. “The high
quality training and expertise delivered by this academy will mean humanitarian
responses not only provide immediate, life-saving relief, but also help build a
more secure and resilient world.”
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