Humanitarian Assistance

Maintaining electricity supply for life-saving health services is a continuous challenge in humanitarian settings where energy supplies are regularly disrupted. Renewable energy systems and backup electricity for when diesel generators cannot be used are prohibitively expensive and not versatile enough for humanitarian purposes. Without adequately mobile, sustainable, and low-cost options for electricity storage and supply, health facilities risk interruption to life-saving activities.

An ALNAP survey (2010) notes that the most difficult challenge recognised by the humanitarian system is “poorly coordinated response efforts/lack of effective leadership". This is largely due to information flow impediments, including inaccessibility, unwillingness, inconsistency, inadequate stream of information, low information priority, source identification difficulty, storage media misalignment and unreliability. Information flow impediments limit coordination and paralyse decision-making.

Access to and quality of health services are major concerns in conflict settings where destruction of health facilities and loss of health professionals limit capacity. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, there have been 485 attacks on health facilities and 60% of hospitals are destroyed or seriously damaged (1,2). Innovative approaches to supporting facility and community care using para-professionals are urgently needed given significant losses of health facilities and staff (1,2).

SurgiBox addresses three problems team members saw while delivering surgery in conflict zones and humanitarian crises. 1) Patient safety - high infection risks in nonsterile facilities. 2) Provider safety - infection risks worsened by inadequate personal protective equipment, as highlighted by but not limited to the Ebola crisis. 3) Surgical capacity - facilities are targets of attack and teams must be nimble, so minimizing footprint infrastructure and simplifying supply chains is key.

Civilians are increasingly the target of hostilities and represent the majority of casualties in current conflicts due to lack of personal protection and greater vulnerability to injury – often from explosive weapons. Mass casualty response and ongoing wound care is difficult because of shortages in medical supplies and personnel. Injury and poor hygiene in austere care settings (conflict as well as disasters and poverty) lead to antibiotic resistant infection and the loss of limbs and lives.

During times of emergency, access to accurate information about what's needed is fragmented and hard to come by. We lack tools to respond quickly and effectively to rapidly changing needs on the ground. Meanwhile, private, NGO and public sector entities want to help but don't know how. There needs to be an easy way for a) local organizations to communicate needs in real-time (internally to external donors & actors) and b) supporters to access and respond to that information.

Health services, along with WASH, in conflict zones suffer from damaged infrastructure and a lack of essential supplies at a time when their services are overwhelmed, particularly in areas like surgery and trauma. The typical response is to import new equipment, at a high cost and subject to extreme logistical obstacles. As a result, people die waiting for treatment, or are put at increased risk of life-threatening infections as lack of equipment means that normal procedures cannot be followed.

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Simon Parrish of Development Initiatives in the United Kingdom will create a toolkit for the generation of a single interoperable dataset from diverse databases to help more users better assess the impact of resource spending in developing countries. Accurately assessing the impact of spending in areas such as health and education in specific locations, and the ability to directly compare different locations, is necessary to effectively eradicate poverty. However, the relevant datasets are currently incompatible or difficult to access by the appropriate communities.

Pushpa Singh of the Civil Society Information Services India in India will develop a common repository to receive, validate, and store information from multiple sources on not-for-profit organizations to make it easier to access support from philanthropic intermediaries. Philanthropic intermediaries currently perform independent searches to find appropriate NGO partners to support, which costs time, money, and effort.