Administration of Humanitarian Aid in Africa  

The purpose of this guide is to provide a starting point for students and practitioners who are researching the administration of humanitarian aid in Africa. Humanitarian aid in Africa is an extremely vast area of study.  Aid may be needed in any part of Africa for various reasons. Armed conflict in an area might displace civilians from their homes or cause a neighboring country to be flooded with refugees, drought and famine might cause tens of thousands to become dangerously close to starvation, or prevention tools and medical treatment for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis, might not be econmically or logistically available to a certain region.  With each of these conditions, a different type of aid will be required. Many organizations have laid the groundwork to make providing that aid possible. Because humanitarian aid in Africa is such a broad topic of research, there is also a wide array of resourses diving into the legal groundwork provided by organizations such as the UN for providing such aid, as well as resourses exploring the successes, failrues and possible consequences of providing aid.

If you are new to researching the administration of humanitarian aid, a research guide might be the best place to start. Though there is not a large amount of research guides in the area of administering humanitarian aid, through a Google search for "humanitarian aid research guides" should be enough to get started.  

The most useful guides I discovered were:

1) Columbia University Libraries

     Human Rights and Humanitarian Affiars: Information Resources.

2) United Nations Centre for Human Rights.

     United Nations Reference Guide in the Field of Human Rights. 

    New York : United Nations, 1993.

3) Raisch, Marylin J.

     International Protection of Human Rights: Outline of the Process and Major Documents and a Brief Research Guide.

     Bora Laskin Law Library, University Of Toronto Faculty of Law, 2004.

Humanitarian aid’ is aid and action designed to save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain and protect human dignity during and in the aftermath of emergencies. The characteristics that mark it out from other forms of foreign assistance and development aid are that:

it is intended to be governed by the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence
it is intended to be short-term in nature and provide for activities in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. In practice it is often difficult to say where ‘during and in the immediate aftermath of emergencies’ ends and other types of assistance begin, especially in situations of prolonged vulnerability.

The updated entries below are mantained by the MDG-Gateway, a blog of the Technical Advisory Panel on the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals)based on themes concerning: poverty and hunger; health and education; environmental sustainability; gender equality and empowerment of women; and global partnership for development.

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