Distribution by Region

Distribution by Organisation Type, Document Type, Region and Year

Emergency occurs mostly in documents published in Europe, closely followed by North America and Asia. Overall, the top five contributors in terms of occurrences are NGO, IGO, NGO_Fed, RC and C/B organisations.

NGO documents provide most occurrences, primarily from activity reports published in Europe and Asia. In second place, occurrences from IGO were mostly obtained from general documents and activity reports published in North America. Occurrences from NGO_Fed were mostly found in activity reports published in Europe, with minor contributions from Oceania, North America and Asia.

Occurrences from RC were mostly obtained from European activity reports. Finally, C/B generates a considerable smaller number of occurrences from only European general documents.

Defined here, an emergency is a situation where the members of a population are suffering or threatened to a point that exceeds the local capacity to respond or cope, and recover.

Child protection in emergencies is the prevention of and response to abuse, neglect, exploitation of and violence against children in emergencies. An emergency is defined as 'a situation where lives, physical and mental well-being, or development opportunities for children are threatened as a result of armed conflict, disaster or the breakdown of social or legal order, and where local capacity to cope is exceeded or inadequate.

The UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) (1994) defines a complex emergency as: a multifaceted humanitarian crisis in a country, region or society where there is total or considerable breakdown of authority resulting from internal or external conflict and which requires a multi-sectoral, international response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of any single agency.

The IHR (2005) define an emergency as an "extraordinary event" that could spread internationally or might require a coordinated international response.

The chart below represents the distribution of emergency between 2005 and 2019 in terms of the number of occurrences and relative frequency of occurrences. It also allows you to view the distribution across Regions, Organisations and Document types.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) was one of the first aid organisations to actively promote education as a core component of emergency response. The provision of education as part of the initial emergency response is ultimately a question of accountability.

The prolonged economic crisis in Europe, throwing into question sums allocated for emergency and development aid, and uncertain geostrategic balances have direct effects on the activities of a Foundation such as ours, which is seeking to find its rightful place in an unstable environment.

Sperl et al. (2006), for example, note that too many international staff were deployed in the UNHCR response in Lebanon and that national staff felt sidelined and disenfranchised after the arrival of emergency response team members.

The role of the UN has come under scrutiny; there have been suggestions that the process of fund allocation is too slow and in some cases a lack of impartiality in complex emergencies .

Supporters of cash responses in emergencies argue that they can be more cost-effective and timely than commodity distribution, give the recipients greater choice and dignity and benefit the economies into which they are injected.

Much needs to be done to clarify the role and functions of clusters in transition situations, as opposed to emergencies. There needs to be a more integrated approach to planning, preparedness and response at country level, identifying key challenges in advance and promoting actions that reduce vulnerability in the long term.

It is paradoxical to see certain emergency relief NGOs criticising the slow pace of reconstruction when certain of their actions, which were designed with an immediate and often very targeted objective, without taking into account their social foundations, contributed to further weakening institutions and the collective response capacity which are indispensable to any kind of recovery and development.