Development Experience Clearinghouse

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The Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) online repository for materials documenting its nearly half century offering international humanitarian aid and economic, agricultural, trade, health, and democratic support.

Humanitarian aid material or logistical assistance provided for humanitarian purposes

Humanitarian aid is material and logistic assistance to people who need help. It is usually short-term help until the long-term help by government and other institutions replaces it. Among the people in need are the homeless, refugees, and victims of natural disasters, wars and famines. Humanitarian aid is material or logistical assistance provided for humanitarian purposes, typically in response to humanitarian crises including natural disasters and man-made disaster. The primary objective of humanitarian aid is to save lives, alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity. It may therefore be distinguished from development aid, which seeks to address the underlying socioeconomic factors which may have led to a crisis or emergency. There is a debate on linking humanitarian aid and development efforts, which was reinforced by the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. However, the approach is viewed critically by practitioners.

Established in 1975, the DEC now holds over 168,000 documents, with over 157,000 of them available electronically. The collection includes oral histories of retired USAID staff, [1] program planning documents from USAID, [2] as well as descriptions of past projects that USAID has sponsored. [3] [4] DEC also produces the DEC Express, a biweekly electronic publication.

Oral history collection of information about something recorded through interviews

Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.

DEC has offices in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.

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References

  1. ↑ DEC Oral History Collection
  2. ↑ Program Planning Documents
  3. ↑ Past USAID Projects
  4. ↑ Lee White's History of the DIS (as told to R&RS staff, November 1989)
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