Message from the Director - April 2007
When a life-threatening disaster strikes suddenly anywhere in the world, humanitarian relief agencies possess an impressive ability to respond rapidly with urgent deliveries of food, shelter, blankets, water and sanitation services, and medical assistance that victims need immediately if they are to survive.
Ensuring delivery of this life-saving assistance in sufficient quantities to often remote or dangerous locations is a core responsibility of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). We are proud of what we accomplish with the help of our partner agencies.
Painful experience has shown, however, that material assistance sometimes does not, by itself, adequately ensure the well-being of people who need our help.
After a natural disaster has struck or a conflict has erupted, civilians often face threats that are not readily visible to outsiders: a breakdown of law and order, lack of physical safety, and rape and related sexual violence. In a disaster situation, victims all too commonly encounter exploitation by authorities, discrimination and intimidation by rival groups, forced conscription, separation from families, and loss of identity documents.
International relief specialists refer to these threats as protection problems. OFDA is taking steps to ensure that all disaster response programs funded by OFDA are designed, implemented, and evaluated with a clear eye on the serious protection problems that confront the very people we are trying to help.
OFDA personnel now undergo training on protection issues and methodologies. OFDA's Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DARTs) now include protection specialists when needed. OFDA's Field Operations Guide as well as its funding guidelines for implementing partners recently have been updated to provide more extensive guidance to help staff and partner agencies recognize and address protection problems in the field more effectively.
The result can be camps for displaced populations that are better designed to improve safety and maximize social cohesion. Emergency water and sanitation projects can be designed to keep women and girls safer when using these services. Emergency health programs can be improved to recognize and better address the physical and psychological trauma of sexual and gender-based violence. Food security programs can be adjusted to ensure fuller participation by the most vulnerable households, thereby improving self-sufficiency and reducing susceptibility to exploitation.
Our fundamental goal in mainstreaming protection into OFDA's traditional sector programming is to reduce the risk and extent of harm to civilians by seeking to minimize the threats of violence, coercion, and deprivation. Although the prime responsibility to provide protection and solutions rests with the government authorities or others who control a given territory, in many cases these actors are either unwilling or incapable of doing so.
In such an environment, humanitarian relief workers by themselves cannot ensure the full safety of the people they assist. Despite those very real constraints, OFDA is committed to doing what we can to try to help disaster victims reduce at least some of the protection risks they face, and if the risks cannot be reduced, our goal at a minimum is to help people manage those risks as effectively as possible.
Ky Luu
Director
Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance
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