View previous stories
	Aid workers are the common face of humanity by Plan International, Concern Worldwide Aid Worker Diaries   Aid workers are the common face of humanity, by Davinder Kumar. (Plan International)   They are out there, always, often the first people to reach. You have seen them feed malnourished children and starving people in the Horn of Africa. You have relied on their eyewitness accounts delivered on webcams as haggard, dazed faces revealed the real scale of Japan’s tsunami and nuclear disaster. You have read about them delivering babies in crammed shelter camps in the flood-affected provinces of Pakistan. You have seen them extricate people alive from the debris of decimated Haiti.   The last few years have seen some of the most challenging catastrophes, natural disasters and conflicts. Nations have had their capacities and resources stretched to the limits and communities have endured tests of survival, sustenance and rebuilding lives. However, in the farthest corners of the world and among the most remote communities, aid-workers are reaching out to millions of people in need, every day.   Amid the turmoil of crises and the sheer challenge of reaching all who need help, aid workers are relentlessly raising the bar of humanitarian assistance the world over. They are saving lives in Ethiopia, protecting children in Afghanistan, giving job skills to youth in Egypt, registering births in Vietnam, providing clean drinking water in Colombia or advocating for girls’ rights in Bangladesh. Cutting across boundaries of nations, religions and cultures – aid workers have become the common face of humanity.   Theirs is a growing force of dedicated people like Rene who treks for eight hours to access the indigenous tribes in the dense rainforests of Occidental Mindoro in the Philippines. It relies on the enthusiasm of community workers like Anubhav who improvises songs and drama to campaign against female foeticide in the villages of India’s Uttar Pradesh. It is led by volunteers like 17-year-old Venance who helps ensure that other refugee children in Liberia’s Grand Gedeh get education and are not lost to ruthless streets.   But the aid-workers are not immune to the perils of extreme challenges they attempt to mitigate for others. Far from home, aid workers brave great dangers and work long hours in the most difficult conditions. They operate in areas which are often isolated, hostile and difficult. They are often at the frontline of calamity and conflict as they help people regardless of who they are and where they come from.   Over the past few years especially, the dangers involved in humanitarian work have increased rapidly. Aid organisations’ staff, facilities and machinery have increasingly come under deliberate attacks. Aid workers now regularly face attacks and abduction. Over the last ten years, 780 aid workers have lost their lives in the line of duty. In 2010 alone, 242 aid workers were killed, injured or kidnapped. Many have lost their colleagues and loved ones.   As you read this, hundreds of aid workers are on the ground delivering relief in the Horn of Africa where over 12 million people are battling a catastrophic combination of conflict, drought and high food prices.   Today, as the United Nations celebrates the World Humanitarian Day to recognise the sacrifices and contributions of aid workers, it is important to emphasise that it is not political parties or nations but dedicated individuals who are doing the most on ground. They are working together as one human race so all people can live in safety and with dignity. Behind those organisation badges are untold stories of great human spirit and endeavour.   * Davinder Kumar is a Press Officer for global child rights and community development organisation Plan International.   ‘Harambee’ on World Humanitarian Day, by Kirk Prichard, Advocacy Officer, in Nairobi for Concern Worldwide.   World Humanitarian Day recognizes the sacrifices and contributions of those who give others help and hope. This year, it is a celebration of people helping people. In Nairobi, where I have been deployed on short notice to support Concern’s emergency response in the Horn of Africa, I see evidence of people helping people every day. And though international staff like myself are called on to contribute to the relief effort, it is almost entirely powered by Kenyans.   Concern’s Kenya team works in partnership with local organizations that are Kenyan-run, Kenyan-staffed, and crucially, implement Kenya-appropriate programs. It is through these partners that so-called humanitarians and aid workers—too often mistaken as solely western—are enabled to reach the poorest of the poor. Concern’s role is to monitor and assess programs, to provide technical expertise when and where it is needed, and to build the capacity of these local partners. We have been in Kenya since 2002, and we will be here for as long as that role is necessary.   In the meantime, local Kenyan organizations on the ground are Concern’s eyes and ears, and they are the lifeblood of the Kenyan program. Their work goes unrecognized and unreported, but they are here, meeting the most urgent needs of the poor, responding to crises that never see the light of day in the west. These are catastrophic emergencies for the most part, like the one that is currently ravaging people in the urban slums and causing the suffering of not just hundreds, but hundreds of thousands.   When one thinks of a drought, the typical pictures of sun-scorched deserts and children starving in makeshift camps come to mind. And while these images accurately portray the plight of millions of rural residents, they leave out a group that is facing the same life and death struggle – the urban poor.   Even before the current drought in Kenya, Nairobi’s vast ‘slums’ were dire places. Raw sewage flows down alleys and past doorways. Shacks are crammed side by side and made of any material available. Violent crime is rampant. HIV rates are twice those in found in the rest of Kenya.   One slum where Concern is operational, Korogocho, means ‘standing side by side’, and the description could not be more fitting. Up to 200,000 people are living in an area of one square mile. Ten or twelve people are often found living in a single small room.   Between rent, water bills, school fees, and food, the average household barely makes it through a day. Economic activity in these slums consists largely of informal activities, such as selling French fries to the drivers stuck in Nairobi’s notorious traffic. A good wage is $3 a day.   Since this latest cycle of drought hit Kenya, food prices have skyrocketed. The price of maize (the staple food of Kenyans) has doubled. As food makes up to 60 percent of a household’s budget, they have seen their purchasing power cut in half in the course of a few short months.   These food price increases are particularly devastating to urban populations; fixed prices for expenses like rent and water make food the only area of budgeting which is flexible. As a result families cut consumption with every cent of increase in food prices. When this increase reaches the levels we are seeing today, tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner become the norm.   As a result Concern has seen childhood malnutrition rates double in the health centers it supports through its partners. Children are forced out of school because they can’t pay fees, crime increases, women are forced into sex work to prevent their children from starving, HIV and disease spread, and social cohesion breaks down as every family member is left to fend for themselves.   Anne epitomizes the daily struggle to survive that urban Kenyan’s face every day. Like many residents of Korogocho, Anne came to Nairobi as a teenager in search of economic opportunity. She found work; first as a maid and then in a food processing plant, started a family, and sent her 4 children to school.   While it was by no means a glamorous life, Anne was surviving, until the recent drought brought her precarious livelihood to the edge of a precipice. The food processing plant has laid her off. Without food from farms there is just none to process. She has tried to find casual employment as a maid, but there is simply no work to be had. The rapid inflation has forced even middle class households to cut back.   Her sister recently died adding her three small children to Anne’s four. They are all living together in a 10-foot by 10-foot room.   What little income she can piece together going door-to-door to wash clothes goes directly towards rent, leaving an ever decreasing portion of food for her and her children. “We are down to about half a cup of ugali (a porridge) per person per day”   Despite this, Anne maintains an incredibly generous spirit. When told of Concern’s upcoming emergency ‘Mobile Technology Cash Transfer Program’ implemented in partnership with local organization “Redeemed,” her thoughts immediately went to others. “You must take care of the elderly first” she says gesturing to a neighboring shack “I am poor and times are bad, but I can walk and I can work, the old have no one and nothing anymore”. Clearly the humanitarian spirit, the ethos of ‘people helping people’ is not unique to those who happen to work for aid organizations. After all, the motto of this country is “Harambee” which means, “We all pull together”   While food prices remain at these near record-high levels in Kenya, families like Anne’s will fight to survive, and will remain the unseen faces of this emergency. We are working to ensure that the impact of the drought on Nairobi’s poorest does not fall below the world’s radar. So, on this World Humanitarian Day, I would like to celebrate not only my Concern Kenya colleagues working around the clock at Concern, along with Concern’s staff in the world’s toughest places in 25 countries, but also our partners on the ground, and the millions of Kenyans like Anne who remind me that all of us are, at our best, humanitarians. Visit the related web page
	Sad history of slave trade can help mankind learn common humanity by Irina Bokova UNESCO Director-General   August 2011   According to UNESCO, some 30 million Africans were forcibly uprooted from their homeland during the 400 year span of the trans atlantic slave trade.   Considered to be the largest forced displacement of people in history, slavery and the transatlantic slave trade have only recently been recognized by the international community as crimes against humanity.   “Unfortunately, despite the unequivocal abolition of slavery, its contemporary forms and manifestations have not been eradicated”, UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay says. “Millions of human beings including women and children from all over the world are trapped into serfdom, forced and bonded labor, trafficking, domestic slavery, sexual slavery, and other abhorrent practices.”   The head of the UNESCO has called on the world to learn the history of the dehumanizing transatlantic slave trade to discover their common humanity and intensify the fight against prejudice and racial discrimination.   “Each of us must be empowered to learn about this past and to reclaim it, as a necessary step in building new common ground,” said Irina Bokova, Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a message to mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.   “Managing cultural diversity and fighting prejudice and racial discrimination raise high stakes in globalizing world,” she said, adding that the Day was an opportunity to reflect on the tragedy of slave trade, and to pay tribute to those who struggled for its abolition in the light of the universal recognition of human rights.   This year’s observance of the Day carries special importance in that it is also the 10th anniversary of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance which was held in Durban, South Africa, where the slave trade was acknowledged as a crime against humanity, Ms. Bokova noted.   The year has also been declared the International Year for People of African Descent. “This is a chance to examine the effects of the slave trade, whose ignominious practice has in part shaped the face of modern society, across all regions of the world. This history can also nourish our thinking about our multicultural and multiethnic societies today,” she said.   UNESCO has worked to break the silence on the slave trade and slavery. The agency will launch a permanent memorial to the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade that will be constructed at UN Headquarters in New York. The memorial will symbolise universal recognition of the tragedy that befell not only Africans and people of African descent, but humanity as a whole.   March 2011   UN honours legacy of transatlantic slave trade victims.   The United Nations has honoured the memory of the millions of innocent victims who suffered over four centuries due to the transatlantic slave trade, focusing on the legacy of those enslaved and their contributions to the societies in which they lived.   “The living legacy of 30 million untold stories” is the theme of this year’s International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which is observed annually on 25 March.   “By studying slavery, we help to guard against humanity’s most vile impulses,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message to mark the Day. “By examining the prevailing assumptions and beliefs that allowed the practice to flourish, we raise awareness about the continued dangers of racism and hatred.   “And by honouring slavery’s victims – as we do with this International Day, with a permanent memorial that will be established at the UN Headquarters complex in New York, and with the observance of 2011 as the International Year for People of African Descent – we restore some measure of dignity to those who had been so mercilessly stripped of it,” he added.   Mr. Ban also addressed a special meeting of the General Assembly to mark the Day, at which he said the challenge today is to remember slavery then, and continue the fight against its contemporary versions now, including debt bondage, domestic servitude, forced marriages and trafficking in children.   “This International Day forces us to confront human beings at their worst,” said the Secretary-General. “But in those who opposed slavery then and now, we also celebrate people at their best: the brave slaves who rose up despite mortal risk; the abolitionists who challenged the status quo; the activists today who fight intolerance and injustice,” he stated. “Whether renowned or unsung, these heroes show that the pursuit of human dignity is the most powerful force of all.”   General Assembly President Joseph Deiss called for a renewed commitment to education programmes on slavery. “Public awareness about the causes, consequences, lessons and legacy of the 400-year-long slave trade are key for a better understanding of history and for educating future generations about the dangers of racism and prejudice and about the universality of human rights.   “It is an opportunity to highlight the fact that regretfully, two centuries after the official abolition of slavery, contemporary forms of slavery-like practices persist, and millions of human beings around the world are still being treated as commodities in a variety of ways,” he noted. Visit the related web page
	View more stories