Faith Actors in the COVID-19 Response

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Faith plays a role in the lives and behaviours of 84% of the world’s population5 and faith leaders in particular can exercise considerable influence in many communities during the current crisis. Faith leaders can be a positive influence, sharing accurate information, modelling healthy behaviours and responding to the most vulnerable. However, without support and engagement, they can also support the spread of misinformation and myths about COVID-19.   Download

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Protecting Forcibly Displaced Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Children face three dangers during the COVID-19 pandemic: 1) infection with the virus; 2) the immediate impacts of measures to stop transmission of the virus (school closures for example); and 3) the long-term impact of the resulting economic crisison social and economic development with regard to the Sustainable Development Goals. Their impact on children will vary based on their age, gender, vulnerability, health, disability, family situation and the wide-ranging, dynamic conditions of their environment. This…

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Recovering the lost heritage of emergency relief

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Local traditions of crisis management—especially those resistant to predatory capitalism—have largely been forcibly shed along the path to “development.” The age of COVID-19 is the time to recover them.   Read more

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Make or Break: The implications of COVID-19 for crisis financing

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Covid-19 is the first global pandemic in a hundred years. It has tested the international crisis response and financing system in novel ways, aggravating well-known challenges and casting light on other unanticipated shortcomings. It has exposed fundamental weaknesses in global preparedness, including substantial under-investment, a tendency to adopt narrow thematic approaches and a widespread failure to prepare for secondary socioeconomic impacts. It has exposed critical dependencies in crisis response systems, including the risks that major…

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Covid-19: a watershed moment for collective approaches to community engagement?

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Effective communication and community engagement (CCE) is a critical component of the response to Covid-19 in humanitarian settings. CCE can support affected people to make informed decisions, manage risk and highlight their evolving needs and priorities. Awareness of CCE’s centrality to the Covid-19 pandemic is already leading to a surge in funding and interest. However, CCE must also address new challenges such as reduced access (particularly to marginalised groups) and more complex coordination environments. Collective…

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The State of the World’s Cash 2020: Cash and Voucher Assistance in Humanitarian Aid

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Since the first State of the World’s Cash Report was published in early 2018, we have seen big developments in cash and voucher assistance (CVA). US $5.6 billion in CVA was programmed in 2019, constituting 17.9 percent of total international humanitarian assistance (IHA) – double the US $2.8 billion programmed in 2016 (10.6 percent of IHA at that time). And it has not just been about delivering more CVA – there has also been an…

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‘All eyes are on local actors’: Covid-19 and local humanitarian action

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Key messages Covid-19 is shining a light on the failure of the humanitarian system to reform. This is especially true in regard to the localisation agenda, which has seen only incremental changes towards more local humanitarian action, leadership and complementarity. The pandemic could usher in more local forms of humanitarian action, and greater complementarity between local and international actors. There is anecdotal evidence of change in discourse, commitments and practice at the global and country…

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Opinion: COVID-19 calls for disrupting the way we communicate in a crisis

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Effective communication is the single most important factor in controlling COVID-19 — as every epidemiologist will tell you. Yet, as the disease continues to spread to some of the most marginalized communities on Earth, the humanitarian response is hitting a wall.   Read more

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The hunger virus: how COVID-19 is fuelling hunger in a hungry world

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COVID-19 is deepening the hunger crisis in the world’s hunger hotspots and creating new epicentres of hunger across the globe. By the end of the year 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself. The pandemic is the final straw for millions of people already struggling with the impacts of conflict, climate change, inequality and a broken food system that has impoverished millions…

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COVID-19 & Poverty and Hunger

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COVID-19 has directly killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It is also taking a deep toll on the food security, nutrition and livelihoods of millions of people across the globe. The socio-economic fallout from COVID-19 has resulted in sharp declines in household income due to job losses and/or reduced livelihoods options. Declining remittances is leading to steep increases in poverty and hunger, particularly in low-income developing countries. Those living in fragile and…

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